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SELECTIONS 



PROM THE 



/ 

WRITINGS OF GEORGE BANCROFT, 



WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



FOR HIGH SCHOOLS, COLLEGES, AND READING CIRCLES. 



By W. W. gist 



Jul 20 






m' 



CHICAGO: 
GEO. SHERWOOD & CO. 

1886. 






COPTRIGHT 1886, 

bt w. w. gist. 



KNIGHT & LEONARD . I 



?^ 



PREFACE. 



Our greatest historian has kindly given me permission 
to prepare a vohime of selections that will illustrate his 
literary style. These extracts will certainly show that 
the facts of history may be presented in the most beauti- 
ful rhetoric. 

W. W. G. 

CoE College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, May, 1886. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Selections 

I. 
11. 

'■ IIL 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 

VII. 

VIII. 

IX. 

X. 

XL 

XII. 

XIII. 

XIV. 

XV. 

XVI. 

XVII. 

XVIII. 

XIX. 

XX. 

XXI. 

XXII. 

XXIII. 

XXIV. 



Page. 

Biographical Sketch, 7 

Tribute to the English Language, . . 15 

Description of Colonial Virginia, . . 15 

The Pilgrims, 17 

The Reformation, 18 

Luther and Calvin, 19 

Roger Williams, 20 

Locke and Penn, 22 

William Penn, 25 

The Christian Religion, 26 

The Puritans, 27 

Cromwell, 32 

The Hudson, 36 

Franklin, 40 

Lexington, 44 

Washington, 49 

John Adams, 5^ 

Abigail Adams, 62 

Declaration of Independence, ... 63 

Thomas Jefferson, 64 

Abraham Lincoln, 68 

The American Revolution, .... 74 

Influence of the Reformation, ... 83 

The Acadians, 86 

Wesley and the Revolution, . . . .89 

Suggestive Questions, 91 

5 



GEORGE BANCROFT. 



Geokge Banckoft is the Nestor of American men of 
letters. Born October 3, 1800, he received his early 
training at Exeter Academy and graduated at Harvard 
in 1817. He is now eighty-six years old and his life has 
touclied every administration except Washington's. 
What mighty changes have been wrought in the land 
since George Bancroft, a manly youth, stepped forth 
from his ahna mater a full-fledged graduate ! Two gene- 
rations have passed away and a third is now on the stage 
of action. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton had not 
yet reached the zenith of their power. These men have 
passed away, and another group, equally great, of whom 
Abraham Lincoln was the central figure, became con- 
spicuous leaders in the most thrilling period of our history, 
and have passed away likewise. Indeed there are thou- 
sands of voters to-day who were born during the exciting 
events of Lincoln's administration. At the time George 
Bancroft graduated, which, in the general acceptation of 
the term, marked the commencement of his life's work. 
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Blaine, Cleveland, and 
Generals Sherman and Sheridan had not been born. 
Some of these have won never fading honors in events 
that have attracted the attention of the whole world, 
and are numbered among our heroes. At that time 
Harvard was a very different institution from what it is 
now ; American literature was in its infancy ; Washing- 
ton Irving had scarcely gained a recognition on the other 
side of the waters. 

7 



8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

Forty-seven years ago Bancroft held a government 
office, and secured for Nathaniel Hawthorne an appoint- 
ment in the Boston custom house. Hawthorne M^as then 
a literary man with some reputation, but his pen did not 
afford him a liveHhood. His great masterpieces were 
written during the next quarter of a century, and 
twenty-two years have passed since the announcement of 
his death cast a gloom over the literary world, while 
his friend and benefactor still survives in the full vigor 
of his intellectual powers. 

Macaulay and Bancroft were born in the same year ; 
the former has l)een dead nearly twenty-seven years ; the 
latter] is giving finishing touches to his great history, 
which merits a place with Macaulay's and Gibbon's. 

George Bancroft's father was the Rev. Aaron Ban- 
croft, D.D., who as a young man participated in the bat- 
tles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, and who in later 
years won an honorable name as a theologian and man 
of letters, his " Life of Washington " attracting consider- 
able attention in Europe. The son inherited many of 
the admirable characteristics of the father. 

After his graduation at Harvard, George Bancroft 
spent five years in Europe, receiving a degree from the 
University of Gottingen, mastering the principal modern 
languages, giving special attention to the study of his- 
tory, visiting the most important nations of the conti 
nent, and above all communing with some of the greatest 
minds of the age. It was his rare privilege to meet and 
to enjoy the friendship of such men as Wolf, the dis- 
tinguished classic scholar, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 
Goethe, Cousin, Alexander von Humboldt, Chevalier 
Bunsen, ISTiebuhr, and others scarcely less distinguished. 

Returning to his native land in 1822, he spent one 
year as tutor of Greek in Harvard, and afterward assisted 
in establishing a preparatory school at Northampton. 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 9 

One of liis pupils at the latter place was John Lothrop 
Motley. The subject of United States history already 
absorbed Bancroft's mind, and the next few years were 
sj)ent in special study for his great work. 

Bancroft has held a number of offices, although he has 
not been conspicuous as a politician. In 1838 President 
Van Buren appointed him collector at the port of Boston, 
and he discharged the duties of the office with marked 
ability. In 1845 he entered President Polk's cabinet as 
Secretary of the Navy. A number of important events 
of this administration are linked with his name. Through 
his influence the naval academy at Annapolis was estab- 
lished, and he introduced many needed reforms into the 
naval service. He ordered the United States fleet to 
assist Captain Fremont in taking possession of California, 
and as Acting Secretary of War he issued orders for the 
United States army to march into Texas at the com- 
mencement of the Mexican War. In 1846 he was ap- 
pointed minister to England, and held the position for 
three years. While in England unusual courtesies were 
extended to him, and every facility was granted for carry- 
ing on historical researches, official state papers and many 
valuable private libraries being accessible. He also 
visited Paris for the purpose of study, and received 
valuable assistance from Guizot and Lamartine. In 1867 
he was appointed minister to Berlin, and I'emained abroad 
a number of years, calling forth a special commendation 
from President Grant for his wise diplomatic services. 

Mr. Bancroft has done considerable literary work in 
addition to writing his " History of the United States." 
When a young man he published a volume of poems ; 
he has contriluited a great many articles to magazines, 
and has delivered a number of memorial addresses on 
prominent Americans. In 1859 he prepared a paper on 
Prescott for the New York Historical Society ; also one 



10 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

on Washington Irving. In 1860 lie delivered an ad- 
dress in Cleveland at the unveiling of the statue of 
Commodore Oliver H. Perry, and February 12, 1866, 
he delivered before the two houses of Congress a mem- 
orial address on President Lincoln. 

Bancroft is known most widely, however, as a histo- 
rian, and his noble history is a monument more durable 
than granite. He brought to his task a mind philosophic 
in character, broad in grasp, impartial in judgment, 
believing firmly in God's superintending care, rich in 
scholarship, and with enough of the imaginative and 
poetical to quicken and vivify all his intellectual powers. 
He has bestowed nearly sixty years of conscientious labor 
on this great historical work, the first volume of whicli 
appeared in 1834. 

The historian requires peculiar talent for his work. 
He must have such patience and energy as will enable 
him to carry on any research that will throw light on 
the subject he is investigating ; he must weigh all evi- 
dence as coolly as the most unprejudiced judge ; he must 
not assume the part of an advocate until he has examined 
the subject from every standpoint and reached an un- 
biased conclusion ; he must grasp the real ideas and 
principles that underlie the events and hasten the prog- 
ress of civilization ; he must have sufficient imagina- 
tion to see the events as real, and to make his readers see 
them as such ; in addition he must have a copiousness of 
illustration and a fluency of language that will enable 
him to present his subject in an attractive form. In 
short, he must be a scholar, an explorer, a philosopher, 
and a rhetorici£|n. Few, if any, have possessed all these 
qualifications in a preeminent degree ; Bancroft certainly 
possesses them all in no small degree. 

Gibbon will doubtless ever hold an honorable place as 
a historical writer ; and yet he attempts to account for 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 11 

the rapid spread of Christianity entirely on human 
grounds, and refuses to recognize the greatest force then 
at work in effecting changes among the nations of the 
world. Macaulay well says of Gibbon : " He writes like 
a man who had received some personal injury from 
Christianity, and wished to be revenged on it and all its 
possessors." No such charge can be made against George 
Bancroft. He is a firm believer in God, recognizes 
Christianity as the most powerful factor in the progress 
of civilization, and continually evinces his unfaltering 
belief in God's superintending care over human affairs. 
The opening paragraph of his address on President Lin- 
coln may be taken as his creed on God in history. Notice 
how clear his statement and how triumphant his faith : 

" That God rules in the affairs of men is as certain as 
any truth in physical science. On the great moving 
power which is from the beginning hangs the world of 
the senses and the world of thought and action. Eternal 
wisdom marshals the great procession of the nations, 
working in patient continuity through the ages, never 
halting and never abrupt, encompassing all events in its 
oversight, and ever effecting its will, though mortals 
may slumber in apathy or oppose with madness. Kings 
are lifted up or thrown down, nations come and go, 
republics flourish and wither, dynasties pass away as a 
tale that is told ; but nothing is by chance, though men, 
in their ignorance of causes, may think so. The deeds 
of time are governed, as well as judged, by the decrees 
of eternity." 

In a recent private letter to Dr. Buckley, of the 
Christian Ad'vocate, Bancroft uses these words quoted in 
that paper : 

" Certainly our great united commonwealth is the 
child of Christianity ; it may with equal truth be asserted 
that modern civilization sprang into life with our relig- 



13 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

ion ; and faith in its principles is tlie life boat on which 
humanity has at divers times escaped the most threaten- 
ing perils." 

But it is not necessary to multiply quotations illustra- 
tive of his faith in the Deity. Throughout the whole of 
his writings he manifests a devout, reverential state of 
mind, and keeps constantly before the reader the idea 
that God is the great power back of those mighty move- 
ments that stir the nations of the world. 

The philosophic east of his mind is clearly revealed 
in all his discussions of causes and results. He firmly 
believes that " the problems of politics cannot be solved 
without passing behind transient forms to efficient 
causes," and he ever seeks to find the real origin of an 
event. He dates the American Revolution back to the 
Reformation under Luther and Calvin, and in relating 
the events that led to a separation from the mother 
country, he discusses with great clearness and elaborate- 
ness three points essential to the proper understanding 
of the subject. In the first ]3lace, he speaks of the 
emancipation of the mind at the Reformation, and the 
consequent birth of the idea of freedom. In the second 
place, he discusses the growth of this idea of freedom in 
the nations of Europe and on this continent. In the 
third place, he describes with wonderful fairness the 
violent discussions that arose in Eno-land and in this 
country when the colonists raised a protest against the 
tyrannies of the mother country. 

While the rhetoric of Bancroft is not faultless, it 
certainly deserves a j^lace in our classic English. In the 
discussion of grave and philosophical questions, his 
stateliness of expression and his dignity of style chal- 
lenge our admiration. His descriptions are very fine, 
and suggest a mind keenly alive to the beautiful and the 
poetical; but they do not reveal that spontaneity so 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 13 

characteristic of Irving, nor that indefinable symmetry 
so noticeable in Hawthorne. If his style is sometimes 
declamatory, I think it is generally in a connection such 
that the cultivated taste will pronounce it admissible. 

Thoroughly versed in the historic lore of this and 
other countries, broad in his general scholarship, remark- 
ably free from prejudice, an uncompromising American, 
and yet not an American in a narrow and bigoted sense, 
careful and systematic in his methods of labor and 
recreation, unswerving in his belief in the superintend- 
ing providence of God, George Bancroft justly merits 
the liigh place of honor and esteem so willingly accorded 
to him, and his noble example should be a never failing 
source of inspiration. 

Note.— The substance of the biographical sketch of Bancroft appeared in the 
Chautauquan for June, 1885. 



I 



WRITINGS OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 



SELECTION I. 

TRIBUTE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, 
language of mj country, take possession of the North 
American continent! Gladden the waste places with 
every tone that has been rightly struck on the English 
lyre, with every English word that has been spoken well 
for liberty and for man ! Give an echo to the now silent 
and solitary mountains; gush out with the fountains 
that as yet sing their anthems all day long without re- 
sponse; fill the valleys with the voices of love in its 
purity, the pledges of friendship in its faithfulness ; and 
as the morning sun drinks the dewdrops from the flow- 
ers all the way from the dreary Atlantic to the Peaceful 
Ocean, meet him with the joyous hum of the early in- 
dustry of freemen ! Utter boldly and spread widely 
through the world the thoughts of the coming apostles 
of the people's liberty, till the sound that cheers the 
desert shall thrill through the heart of humanity, and 
the lips of the messenger of the people's power, as he 
stands in beauty upon the mountains, shall proclaim the 
renovating tidings of equal freedom for the race ! — Hist. 
Vol. III., 302. 



SELECTION IL 

DESCEIPTION OF COLONIAL VIKGINIA. 

The genial climate and transparent atmosphere de- 
lighted those who had come from the denser air of 



16 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

England. Every object in nature was new and wonder- 
ful. The loud and frequent thunderstorms were phe- 
nomena that had been rarely witnessed in the colder 
summers of the north ; the forests, majestic in their 
growth, and free from underwood, deserved admiration 
for their unrivaled magnificence ; purling streams and 
frequent rivers, flowing between alluvial banks, quick- 
ened the ever pregnant soil into an unwearied fertility ; 
strange and delicate flowers grew familiarly in the flelds ; 
the woods were replenished with sweet barks and odors ; 
the gardens matured the fruits of Europe, of which the 
growth was invigorated and the flavor improved by 
the virgin mold. Especially the birds, with their gay 
plumage and varied melodies, inspired delight ; every 
traveler expressed his pleasure in listening to the mock- 
ing bird, which caroled a thousand several tunes, imitat- 
ing and excelling the notes of all its rivals. The hum- 
ming bird, so brilliant in its plumage, and so delicate in 
its form, quick in motion, yet not fearing the presence of 
man, haunting the flowers like the bee gathering honey, 
rebounding from the blossoms into which it dips its bill, 
and as soon returning " to renew its many addresses to 
its delightful objects," was ever admired as the smallest 
and the most beautiful of the feathered race. The rat- 
tlesnake, with the terrors of its alarms and the power of 
its venom; the opossum, soon to become as celebrated 
for the care of its offspring as the fabled pelican ; the 
noisy frog, booming from the shallows like the English 
bittern ; the flying squirrel ; the myriads of pigeons, 
darkening the air with the immensity of their flocks, 
and, as men believed, breaking with their weight the 
boughs of trees on which they alighted, were all honored 
with frequent commemoration, and became the subjects 
of the strangest tales. The concurrent relation of Indi- 
ans justified the belief that witliin ten days' journey to- 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 



17 



ward the setting of the sun, there was a country where 
gold might be washed from the sand, and where the 
natives had learned the use of the crucible, but inquiry 
was always baffled, and the regions of gold remained 
for two centuries undiscovered. — Vol. I., Page 17o. 



SELECTION 111. 

THE PILGRIMS. 

Who will venture to measure the consequence of 
actions by the humility or the remoteness of their origin \ 
The Power which enchains the destinies of states, over- 
rulino- the decisions of sovereigns and the forethought of 
statesmen, often deduces the greatest events from the 
least considered causes. A Genoese adventurer, discover- 
ing America, changed the commerce of the world ; an 
obscure German, inventing the printing press, rendered 
possible the universal diffusion of increased intelligence ; 
an Augustine monk, denouncing the indulgences, intro- 
duced a schism in religion, and changed the foundations 
of European politics ; a young French refugee, skilled 
alike in theology and civil law, in the duties of magis- 
trates and the dialects of religious controversy, entering 
the republic of Geneva, and conforming its ecclesiastical 
discipline to the principles of republican simplicity, 
established a party of which Englishmen became mem- 
bers, and New England the asylum. The enfranchise- 
ment of the mind from religious despotism led directly 
to inquiries into the nature of civil government, and the 
doctrines of popular liberty, which sheltered their in- 
fancy in the wilderness of the newly discovered conti- 
nent, within the short space of two centuries have 
infused themselves into the life blood of every rising 
state from Labrador to Chili ; have erected outposts on 



18 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

the Oregon and in Liberia ; and, making a proselyte of 
enlightened France, have disturbed all the ancient govern- 
ments of Europe, by awakening the pnblic mind to resist- 
less action from the shores of Portugal to the palaces of 
the czars.— Vol. /., Page 203. 



SELECTION IV. 

THE REFORMATION. 

In Germany the Reformation sprung not from the 
superior authority of the sovereign, but from a peasant- 
born man of the people, and aimed at a regeneration 
both in morals and doctrine. When Martin Luther 
proclaimed that justification is by faith alone, supersti- 
tion was at one blow cut up by the roots. The super- 
natural charm which hung over the order which had, or 
whose chief had, time out of mind, usurped the exclus- 
ive right to absolve from sin and to interpose themselves 
between man and God, was dissolved. Every man be- 
came his own priest, and was directly in the hands of 
the Almighty, with no other mediator than the Eternal 
Wisdom, with no absolution for evil deeds but by repent- 
ance and a new life. There could be no higher expres- 
sion of the liberty of the individual over against his fel- 
low men. The claim of right to the freedom of private 
judgment is a feeble and partial statement in compari- 
son, for it declares the individual man under God alone, 
not the keeper of his judgment only, but independent 
of pope, bishop, priest, and all others of his kind, the 
keeper of his reason, affections, conscience, and charac- 
ter, — in a word, of his whole being, now and hereafter. 
Therefore it is that, in an age when political questions 
were enounced in theological forms, justification by faith 



OF OEORGE BANCROFT. 19 

alone was the inscription on the gate tlirongh which tlie 
more advanced of the human race were to pass to free- 
dom.— Vol. /., Page 9A0. 



SELECTION V. 



LUTHER AND CALVIN. 



Both Lnther and Calvin brought the individual into 
immediate relation with God ; but Calvin, under a more 
stern and militant form of doctrine, lifted the individual 
above pope and prelate and priest and presbj^ter, a1)0ve 
Catholic churcli and national church and general synod, 
above indulgences, remissions, and absolutions from fel- 
low mortals, and brought him into tlie innnediate de- 
pendence on God, whose eternal, irreversible choice is 
made by Himself alone, not aHutrarily, but according to 
His own highest wisdom and justice. Luther spared the 
ahar, and hesitated to deny totally the real presence ; 
Calvin, with superior dialectics, accepted, as a commemo- 
ration and a seal, the rite which the Catholics revered as 
a sacrifice. Luther favored magnificence in public wor- 
ship as an aid to devotion ; Calvin, the guide of republics, 
avoided in their churches all appeals to the senses, as a 
peril to pure religion. Lutlier condemned the Roman 
church for its immorality ; Calvin, for its idolatry. Luther 
exposed the folly of superstition, ridiculed the hair shirt 
and the scourge, the purchased indulgence, and dearly 
bought, worthless masses for the dead ; Calvin shrunk 
from their criminality with impatient horror. Luther 
permitted the cross and the taper, pictures and images, 
as things of indifference ; Calvin demanded a spiritual 
worship in its utmost purity. Luther left the organiza- 
tion of the church to princes and governments ; Calvin 
reformed doctrine, ritual, and practice, and by establish- 



20 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

ing ruling elders in each clnircli, and an elective synod, 
he secured to his polity a representative character, which 
combined authority with popular rights. 

Both Luther and Calvin insisted that, for each one, 
there is and can be no other priest than himself ; and, as 
a consequence, both agreed in the parity of the clergy. 
Both were of one mind, that, should pious laymen choose 
one of their number to be their minister, " the man so 
chosen M'ould be as truly a priest as if all the bishops in 
the world had consecrated him." — Vol. /., Page '21^. 



SELECTION VL 



ROGER WILLIAMS. 



At a time when Germany was desolated by the im- 
placable wars of religion ; wdien even Holland could not 
pacify vengeful sects ; when France was still to go through 
the fearful struggle with l)igotry ; when England was 
gasping under the despotism of intolerance ; almost half 
a century before William Penn became an American pro- 
prietary, and two years before Descartes founded modern 
philosophy on the method of free reflection, Roger Will- 
iams asserted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty. It 
became his glory to found a state upon that principle, and 
to stamp 'himself upon its rising institutions in characters 
so deep that the impress has remained to the present day, 
and can never be erased without the total destruction of 
the work. The principles which he first sustained amidst 
the Ijickerings of a colonial parish, next asserted in the 
general court of Massachusetts, and then introduced into 
the wilds on Narragansett Bay, he soon found occasion 
to publish to the world, and to defend as the basis of the 
religious freedom of mankind, so that, borrowing the 
rhetoric employed l)y his antagonist in derision, we may 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 21 

compare him to the lark, the pleasant bird of the peace- 
ful summer, that, " ali'ecting to soar aloft, sj)rings upward 
from the ground, takes his rise from pale to tree," and 
at last, surmounting the highest hills, utters his clear 
carols through the skies of morning. He was the first 
person in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude 
the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of 
opinions before the law ; and in its defense he was the 
harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of 
Jeremy Taylor. For Taylor limited his toleration to a 
few Christian sects ; the philanthropy of Williams com- 
passed the earth. Taylor favored partial reform, com- 
mended lenity, argued for forbearance, and entered a 
special plea in behalf of each tolera])le sect; Williams 
would permit persecution of no opinion, of no religion, 
leaving heresy unharmed by law, and orthodoxy unpro- 
tected by the terrors of penal statutes. Taylor clung to 
the necessity of positive regulations enforcing religion 
and eradicating error — like the poets, who tirst declare 
their hero to be invulnerable, and then clothe him in 
earthly armor ; AVilliams was willing to leave Truth alone 
in her own panoply of light, believing that if in the an- 
cient feud between Truth and Error the employment of 
force could be entirely abrogated. Truth would have much 
the best of the bargain. 

It is the custom of mankind to award high honors to 
the successful inquirer into the laws of nature, to those 
who advance the bounds of human knowledge. We praise 
the man who first analyzed the air, or resolved water into 
its elements, or drew the lightning from the clouds, even 
though the discoveries may have been as much the fruits 
of time as of genius. A moral principle has a much 
wider and nearer influence on human happiness ; nor 
can any discovery of truth be of more direct benefit to 
society than that wdiich establishes a perjjetual religious 



22 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

peace, and spreads tranquillity through every connnunity 
and every bosom. If Copernicus is held in perpetual 
reverence because, on his death-bed, he published to the 
world that the sun is the center of our system ; if the 
name of Kepler is preserved for his sagacity in detecting 
the laws of the planetary motion ; if the genius of New- 
ton has been almost adored for dissecting a ray of light, 
and weighing heavenly bodies as in a balance, — let there 
be for the name of Roger Williams a place among those 
who have advanced moral science, and made themselves 
the benefactors of mankind. — Vol. /., Page 297, 



SELECTION YII. 



LOCKE AND PENN. 



Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant ; both loved 
freedom ; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke 
kindled the torch of liberty at the tires of tradition ; 
Penn, at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth 
through the senses and the outward world ; Penn looked 
inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke 
compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as 
Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which time and 
chance might scrawl their experience ; to Penn the soul 
was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine 
harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so 
curiously and perfectly framed that when once set in 
motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies 
designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, 
" Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our 
own actions " ; to Penn, it is the image of God, and his 
oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, 
esteemed " the duty of parents to preserve their children 
not to be understood without rewai-d and j)unishment " ; 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 23 

Penn loved liis children, with not a thought for the 
consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares 
marriage an affair of the senses ; Penn reverenced 
woman as the object of inward, fervent affection, made 
not for lust, but for love. In studying the understand- 
ing, Locke ])egins with the sources of knowledge ; Penn, 
with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke 
deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon 
conti'act, and announces its end to be the security of 
property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even 
to Noah, declares that '' there must l)e a people before a 
government," and, deducing the right to institute gov- 
ernment from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental 
rules in the immutable dictates " of universal reason," its 
end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends 
itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests 
and purposes ; the doctrine of Fox and Penn being but 
the common creed of humanity, forbids division and 
insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is 
pleasure ; things are good and evil only in reference to 
pleasure and pain ; and to " inquire after the highest 
good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be 
in apples, plums, or nuts " ; Penn esteemed happiness to 
lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct 
of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally 
and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the in- 
quiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of 
existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and 
punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly riglit to 
eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in " ; Penn, 
like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible 
to despots that God is to be loved for his own sake, and 
virtue to be practiced for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke 
derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it 
as purely negative, and attributes it to notliing but space. 



24 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

duration, and number ; Penn derived the idea from the 
soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue and God. Locke 
declares immortality a matter with which reason has 
nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained 
by outward signs and visil)le acts of power ; Penn saw 
truth by its owm light, and sunnnoned the soul to bear 
witness to its own glory. Locke believed " not so many 
men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because 
the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not 
know what they contend for " ; Penn likewise vindicated 
the many, but it was because truth is the common in- 
heritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, 
inveighed against the methods of persecution as " popish 
practices " ; Penn censured no sect, but condemned big- 
otry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American 
lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and re- 
served all power to wealth and the feudal proprieta- 
ries ; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, 
his light in every soul, and therefore he built — 
such are his own words — "a free colony for all man- 
kind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an 
age which had seen a popular revolution shipwreck 
popular liberty among selfish factions, which had seen 
Hugh Peter and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's 
cord and the axe ; in an age when Sydney nourished the 
pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philan- 
thropy, when Russell stood for the liberties of his order, 
and not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington and 
Shaftesbury and Locke thought government should rest 
on property,— Penn did not despair of humanity, and, 
though all history and experience denied the sover- 
eignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of 
man's capacity for self-government. Conscious that 
there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure 
enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 25 

was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute "The 
Holy Expekiment."" — Vol. II., Pmje 119. 



SELECTION VIII. 



WILLIAM PENN. 



No man in England was more opposed to Roman 
Catholic dominion ; but, like an honest lover of truth, 
and well aware that he and George Fox could wnn more 
converts than James II. and the pope, with all their pat- 
ronage, he desired, in the controversy with the Roman 
church, nothing but equality. He knew that popery was 
in England the party of the past, from causes that lay in 
the heart of society, incapable of restoration ; and tliere- 
fore he ridiculed the popish panic as a scarecrow fit only 
to frighten children. Such was the strong antipathy of 
England to the Roman see, he foretold the sure success 
of the English church, if it should plow with tliat 
heifer, but equally predicted the still later result, that 
the Catholics, in their turn, becoming champions of civil 
freedom, would unite with its other advocates, and impair 
and subvert the English hierarchy. Penn never gave 
counsel at variance with popular rights. He resisted the 
commitment of the bishops to the Tower, and on the 
day of the birth of the Prince of Wales, pressed the king 
exceedingly to open their prison doors. His private 
correspondence proves that he esteemed parliament the 
only power through which his end could be gained, and, 
in the true spirit of liberty, he sought to infuse his prin- 
ciples into the public mind, that so they might find their 
place in the statute book through the convictions of his 
countrymen. England to-day confesses his sagacity, and 
is doing honor to his genius. He came too soon for suc- 
cess, and he was aware of it. After more than a cen- 



26 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

tury, the laws whicli lie reproved began gradiially to 
be repealed ; and the principle which he developed is 
slowly but firmly asserting its power over the legislation 
of Great Britain. 

The political connections of William Penn have in- 
volved him in the obloquy whicli followed the overthrow 
of the Stuarts ; and the friends to the tests, comprising 
nearly all the members of both political parties, into 
which England was soon divided, have generally been 
unfriendly to his good name. But their malice has been 
without permanent effect. There are not wanting those 
who believe the many to be the most competent judge of 
the beautiful ; every Quaker believes them the best arbi- 
ter of the just and the true. It is certain that they, and 
they only, are the dispensers of glory. Their final award 
is given freely, and cannot be shaken. Every charge of 
hypocrisy, of selfishness, of vanity, of dissimulation, of 
credulous confidence ; every form of reproach, from vir- 
ulent abuse to cold apology ; every ill-meant word from 
tory and Jesuit to blasphemer and infidel, — has been 
used against Penn ; but the candor of his character has 
always triumphed over calumny, His name was safely 
cherished as a household word in the cottages of Wales 
and Ireland, and among the peasantry of Germany ; and 
not a tenant of a wigwam from the sea to the Susque- 
hanna doubted his integrity; his fame is now wide as 
the world ; he is one of the few who have gained abid- 
ing glory. — Vol. II., Page 132. 



SELECTION IX. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



The colonists, including their philosophy in their 
religion, as the people up to that thne had always done, 
were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians. 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 27 

The seliool that bows to tlie senses as the sole interpreter 
of trnth had little share in colonizing our America. The 
colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adv^enturous com- 
panions of Smith, the proscribed Puritans that freighted 
the lleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from 
jails, with a Newgate prisoner as their sovereign, — all 
had faith in God and in the soul. The system which had 
been revealed in Judea, — the system which combines 
and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient, and the 
reflective genius of Greece, — the system, conforming to 
reason, yet kindling enthusiasm ; always hastening re- 
form, yet always conservative ; proclaiming absolute 
equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the 
unequal institutions of society ; guaranteeing absolute 
freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of 
duty ; in the highest degree theoretical, and yet in the 
highest degree practical ; awakening the inner man to a 
consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact 
harmony to the outward world ; at once divine and 
human — this system was professed in every part of our 
widely extended country, and cradled our freedom. 

Our fathers were not only Christians ; they were, 
even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost 
unanimously, Protestants. Now the Protestant Refor- 
mation, considered in its largest influence on politics, 
was the awakening of the common people to freedom of 
mind. — Vol. II., Page 177. 



SELECTION X. 



THE PURITANS. 



There are some who love to enumerate the singulari- 
ties of the early Puritans. They w^ere opposed to wigs ; 
they could preach against veils ; they denounced long 



28 SELECTIONS FR03I THE WRITINGS 

hair ; t'liej disliked the cross in the banner, as much as 
the people of Paris disliked the lilies of the Bourbons. 
They would not allow Christmas to be kept sacred ; thej 
called neither months, nor days, nor seasons, nor churches, 
nor inns by the names common in England ; they revived 
Scripture names at christenings. The grave Romans 
legislated on the costume of men, and their senate could 
even stoop to interfere with the triumplis of the sex to 
which civic honors are denied ; the fathers of New En- 
gland prohibited frivolous fashions in their own dress ; 
and their austerity, checking extravagance even in wom- 
an, frowned on her hoods of silk and her scarfs of tiifany, 
extended the length of her sleeve to the wrist, and 
limited its greatest w^idth to half an ell. The Puritans 
were formal and precise in their manners, singular in 
the forms of their legislation, rigid in the observance of 
their principles. Every topic of the day found a place 
in their extemporaneous prayers, and infused a stirring 
interest into their long and frequent sermons. The courts 
of Massachusetts respected in practice the code of Moses ; 
the island of Rhode Island followed for a year or two 
Jewish precedents j in New Haven the members of the 
constituent committee were called the seven pillars, hewn 
out for the house of wisdom. But these are only the 
outward forms which gave to the new sect its marked 
exterior. If from the outside peculiarities, which so 
easily excite the sneer of the superficial observer, we 
look to the genius of the sect itself, Puritanism was 
religion struggling for the people; a war against tyr- 
anny and superstition. " Its absurdities," says one of its 
scoffers, " were the shelter for the noble principles of lib- 
erty." It was its office to engraft the new institutions of 
popular energy upon the old European system of a feudal 
aristocracy and popular servitude ; the good was perma- 
nent ; the outward emblems, wliich were the signs of the 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 



29 



party, were of transient duration, like the clay and liga- 
ments which hold the graft in its place, and are brnshed 
away as soon as the scion is firmly united. 

The principles of Puritanism proclaimed the civil 
magistrate subordinate to the authority of religion ; and 
its haughtiness in this respect has been compared to the 
'" infatuated arrogance " of a Roman pontiff. In the 
firmness with which the princi])le was asserted, the Puri- 
tans did not yield to the Catholics ; and if the will of 
God is the criterion of justice, both were, in one sense, 
in the right. The question arises. Who shall be the in- 
terpreter of that will 'i In the Roman Catholic Church 
the office was claimed by the infallible pontiff, who, as the 
self-constituted guardian of the oppressed, insisted on the 
power of dethroning kings, repealing laws, and subvert- 
ing dynasties. The principle thus asserted could not but 
become subservient to the temporal ambition of the 
clergy. Puritanism conceded no such power to its spir- 
itual guides ; the church existed independent of its pas- 
tor, who owed his office to its free choice ; the will of 
the majority was its law ; and each one of the brethren 
possessed equal rights with the elders. The right, exer- 
cised by each congregation, of electing its own ministers 
was in itself a moral revolution ; religion was now with 
the people, not over the people. Puritanism exalted the 
laity. Every individual who had experienced the rapt- 
ures of devotion, every believer, who in moments of 
ecstasy had felt the assurance of the favor of God, was 
in liis own eyes a consecrated person, chosen to do the 
noblest and ffodliest deeds. For him the wonderful coun- 
sels of the Almighty had appointed a Saviour ; for him 
the laws of nature had been suspended and controlled, 
the heavens had opened, earth had quaked, the sun had 
veiled his face, and Christ had died and had risen 
again ; fur him prophets and apostles had revealed to the 



30 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

world the oracles and the will of God. Before heaven 
he prostrated himself in the dust. Looking out npon 
mankind, how could he but respect himself whom God 
had chosen and redeemed ? He cherished hope, he pos- 
sessed faith ; as he walked the earth his heart was in the 
skies. Angels hovered round his path, charged to min- 
ister to his soul ; spirits of darkness vainly leagued to- 
gether to tempt him from his allegiance. His burning 
piety could use no liturgy ; his penitence revealed itself 
to no confessor. He knew no superior in holiness. He 
could as little become the slave of a priestcraft as of a 
despot. He was himself a judge of the orthodoxy of 
the elders ; and if he feared the invisible powers of the 
air, of darkness, and of hell, he feared nothing on earth. 
Puritanism constituted not the Christian clergy, but the 
Christian people, the interpreter of the divine will. The 
voice of the majority was the voice of God ; and the 
issue of Puritanism was popular sovereignty. 

The effects of Puritanism display its character still 
more distinctly. Ecclesiastical tyranny is of all kinds 
the worst ; its fruits are cowardice, idleness, ignorance, 
and poverty. Puritanism was a life-giving spirit ; activ- 
ity, thrift, intelligence followed in its train ; and as for 
courage, a coward and a Puritan never went together. 

It was in self-defense that Puritanism in America 
began those transient persecutions which shall find in 
me no apologist, and which yet were no more than a 
train of mists hovering of an autumn morning over the 
channel of a fine river, that diffused freshness and fer- 
tility wherever it wound. The people did not attempt 
to convert others, but to protect themselves; they never 
punished opinion as such ; they never attempted to tor- 
ture or terrify men into orthodoxy. The history of re- 
ligious persecution in New England is simply this : the 
Puritans established a government in America, such as 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 31 

the laws of natural justice warranted, and such as the 
statutes and common law of England did not warrant ; 
and that was done by men who still acknowledged a lim- 
ited allegiance to the parent state. The Episcopalians 
had declared themselves the enemies of the party, and 
waged against it a war of extermination. Puritanism 
excluded them from its asylum. Roger Williams, the 
apostle of " soul liberty," weakened civil independence 
by impairing its unity, and he was expelled, even though 
Massachusetts bore good testimony to his spotless virtues. 
Wheelwright and his friends, in their zeal for liberty of 
speech, were charged with forgetting their duty as citi- 
zens, and they also were exiled. The Anabaptist, who 
could not be relied upon as an ally, was guarded as a foe. 
The Quakers denounced the worship) of New England as 
an abomination, and its government as treason ; and they 
were excluded on pain of death. The fanatic for Cal- 
vinism was a fanatic for liberty ; and in the moral war- 
fare for freedom his creed was his support, and his most 
faithful ally in the battle. 

•x- ** * * * * * 

Historians have loved to eulogize the manners and vir- 
tues, the glory and the benefits, of chivalry. Puritanism 
accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the secta- 
rian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dis- 
soluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of 
spirit ; the Puritans from the fear of God. The kniglits 
obeyed the law of honor ; the Puritans hearkened to the 
voice of duty. The knights were proud of loyalty ; the 
Puritans of liberty. The knights did homage to mon- 
archs, in whose smile they belield honor, whose rebuke 
was the wound of disgrace ; the Puritans, disdaining cer- 
emony, would not bow at the name of Jesus, nor bend 
the knee to the King of kings. Chivalry delighted in 
outward show, favored pleasure, multiplied amusements. 



32 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

and degraded the human race by an exchisive respect for 
the privileged classes ; Puritanism bridled the passions, 
commanded the virtues of self-denial, and rescued the 
name of man from dishonor. The former valued cour- 
tesy ; the latter, justice. The former adorned society by 
graceful refinements ; the latter founded national grand- 
eur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry 
were subverted by the gradually increasing weight and 
knowledge and opulence of the industrious classes ; the 
Puritans, rallying upon those classes, planted in their 
hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty. — Vol. 
/., Page 370. 



SELECTION XL 



CROMWELL. 



Ceomwell was one whom even his enemies cannot 
name without acknowledging his greatness. 

The farmer of Huutingdon, accustomed only to rural 
occupations, unnoticed till he was more than forty years 
old, engaged in no higher plots than how to improve the 
returns of liis land and lill his orchard with choice fruit, 
of a sudden became the best officer in the British army, 
and the greatest statesman of his time ; subverted the 
English constitution, wliich had been the work of centu- 
ries ; held in his own grasp the liberties which formed a 
part of the nature of the English people, and cast the 
kingdoms into a new mold. Religious peace, such as 
England till now has never again seen, flourished under 
his calm mediatiou ; justice found its way even among 
the remotest Highlands of Scotland ; commerce filled the 
English marts with prosperous activity ; his fleets rode 
triumphant in the West Indies ; Nova Scotia submitted 
to his orders without a struggle; the Dutch begged of 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 33 

him for peace as for a boon ; Louis XIV, was humiliated ; 
the Protestants of Piedmont breathed their prayers in 
security. His squadron made sure of Jamaica ; he had 
strong thoughts of Hispaniola and Cuba ; and, to use his 
own words, resolved " to strive with the Spaniard for the 
mastery of all those seas." The glory of the English was 
spread throughout the world ; " Under the tropic was 
their language spoke." 

And yet his career was but an attempt to conciliate a 
union between his power and permanent public order; 
and the attempt was always unavailing, from the inherent 
impossibility growing out of the origin of his power. It 
was derived from tlie submission, not from the will of the 
people ; it came by the sword, not from the nation, nor 
from established national usages, Cromwell saw the 
impracticability of a republic, and offered no excuse for 
his usurpations but the right of the strongest to restore 
tranquillity — the old plea of tyrants and oppressors from 
the beginning of the world. 

He had made use of the enthusiasm of liberty for his 
advancement ; he sought to sustain himself by conciliat- 
ing the most opposite sects. For the republicans he had 
apologies. " The sons of Zeruiah, the lawyers and the 
men of wealth, are too strong for us. If we speak of 
reform, they cry out that we design to destrqy all propri- 
ety." To the witness of the young Quaker against priest- 
craft and war, he replied : " It is very good ; it is truth ; 
if THOU and I were but an hour of a day together, we 
should be nearer one to the other." From the field of 
Dunbar he had charged the Long Parliament " to reform 
abuses, and not to multiply poor men for the benefit of 
the rich." Presently he appealed to the moneyed men 
and the lawyers ; " he alone could save them from the 
levelers, men more ready to destroy than to reform." 
Did the sincere levelers, the true commonwealth's men, 
3 



34 SELECTIONS FRO 31 THE WRITINGS 

make their way into his presence, lie assured them " he 
preferred a shepherd's crook to the office of protector ; 
he would resign all power so soon as God should reveal 
his definite will " ; and then he would invite them to 
pray, " For," said he one day to the poet Waller, " I 
must talk to these people in their own style." Did the 
passion for political equality blaze up in the breasts of the 
yeomanry who constituted his bravest troops, it was 
checked by the terrors of a military execution. The 
Scotch Presbyterians could not be cajoled ; he resolved to 
bow their pride ; and did it in the only way in which it 
could be done, by wielding against their bigotry the great 
conception of the age, the doctrine of Roger Williams 
and Descartes' freedom of conscience. 

" Approbation," said he, as I believe, with sincerity of 
conviction, "is an act of conveniency, not of necessity. 
Does a man speak foolishly, suiier him gladly, for ye are 
wise. Does he speak erroneously, stop such a man's 
mouth with sound words that cannot be gainsaid. Does 
he speak truly, rejoice in the truth." To win the royal- 
ists, he obtained an act of amnesty, a pledge of future 
favor to such of them as would submit. He courted the 
nation by exciting and gratifying national pride, by able 
negotiations, by victory and conquest. He sought to 
enlist in his favor the religious sympathies of the people, 
by assuming for England a guardianship over the inter- 
ests of Protestant Christendom. 

Seldom was there a less scrupulous or more gifted 
politician than Cromwell. But he was no longer a leader 
of a party. He had no party. A party cannot exist ex- 
cept by the force of common principles ; it is truth, and 
truth only, that of itself rallies men together. Crom- 
well, the oppressor of the independents, had ceased to 
respect principles; his object was the advancement of 
his family ; his hold on opinion went no farther than the 



OF OEOROE BANCROFT. 35 

dread of anarchy, and the strong desire for order. If 
moderate and disinterested men consented to his power, 
it was to liis power as high constable, engaged to preserve 
tlie pul)lic peace. He could not confer on his country a 
fixed form of government, for that recpnred a concert 
with the national affections, which he was never able to 
gain. He had just notions of public liberty, and he un- 
derstood how much the English people are disposed to 
magnify their representatives. Thrice did he attempt to 
connect his usurpation with the forms of representative 
government, and always without success. His first par- 
liament, convened by special writ, and mainly composed 
of the members of the party by w^hich he had been ad- 
vanced, represented the movement in the English mind 
which had been the cause of the revolution. It indulged 
in pious ecstasies, laid claim to the special enjoyment of 
the presence of Jesus Christ, and spent whole days in 
exhortations and prayers. But the delirium of mysticism 
was not incompatil)le with clear notions of policy ; and 
amidst the hyperl)oles of Oriental diction, tliey prepared to 
overthrow despotic power by using the power a despot 
had conceded. The objects of this assembly were all 
democratic : it labored to effect a most radical reform ; 
to codify English law by reducing the huge volume of 
the common law into a few simple English axioms ; to 
abolish tithes, and to establish an absolute religious free- 
dom, such as the United States now enjoy. This parlia- 
ment has for ages been the theme of unsparing ridicule. 
Historians, with little generosity toward a defeated party, 
have sided against the levelers, and the misfortune of 
failure in action has doomed them to censui-e and con- 
tempt. Yet they only demanded what had often been 
promised, and what, on the immutable principles of free- 
dom, was right. They did l)ut remember the truths 
which Cromwell had professed, and had forgotten. 



36 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

Fearing their influence, and finding the republicans too 
honest to become the dupes of his ambition, he induced 
such members of the House of Commons as were his crea- 
tures to resign, and scattered the rest with his troops. 
The pubhc looked on with much indiiference. This par- 
liament from the mode of its convocation, was unpopu- 
lar ; the royalists, the army, and the Presbyterians, alike 
dreaded its activity. With it expired the last feel)le 
hope of a commonwealth. The successful soldier at once 
and openly pleading the necessity of the moment, as- 
sumed supreme power as the highest peace ofticer in the 
realm.— Vol. Z, Page 393. 



SELECTION XII. 



THE HUDSON. 



Hudson went on shore in one of the boats of the na- 
tives with an aged chief of a small tribe of the River 
Indians. He was taken to a house well constructed of 
oak bark, circular in shape, and arched in the roof, the 
granary of the beans and maize of the last year's harvest ; 
while outside enough of them lay drying to load three 
ships. Two mats were spread out as seats for the stran- 
gers ; food was immediately served in neat red wooden 
bowls ; men, who were sent at once with bows and 
arrows for game, soon returned with pigeons ; a fat dog, 
too, was killed, and haste made to prepare a feast. 
When Hudson refused to wait, they supposed him to be 
afraid of their weapons ; and taking their arrows they 
broke them in pieces and threw them into the fire. The 
country was pleasant and fruitful, bearing wild grapes. 
" Of all lands on which I ever set my foot," says Hud- 
son, " this is the best for tillage." The River Indians, 
for more than a century, preserved the memory of his 
visit. 



OF OEOROE BANCROFT. 37 

The " Half Moon," on the nineteenth, drew near the 
landing of Kinderhook, where the Indians brought on 
board skins of beaver and otter. Hudson ventured no 
higher with the yacht ; an exploring boat ascended a 
little al)ove Albany to where the river was but seven feet 
deep, and the soundings grew uncertain. 

So, on the twenty-third, Hudson turned his prow 
toward Holland, leaving the friendly tribes persuaded 
that the Dutch would revisit them the next year. As he 
went down the river, imagination peopled the region 
with towns. A party which, somewhere in Ulster county, 
went to walk on the west bank, found an excellent soil, 
with large trees of oak and walnut and chestnut. The 
land near Newburg seemed a very pleasant site for a 
city. On the first of October Hudson passed below the 
mountains. On the fourth, not without more than one 
conflict with the savages, he sailed out of " the great 
mouth of THE GREAT KivER " wliicli bcars his name, and 
about the season of the return of John Smith from Vir- 
ginia to England, he steered for Europe, leaving to its 
solitude the beautiful land which he admired beyond any 
country in the world. 

Somber forests shed a melancholy grandeur over the 
useless magnificence of nature, and hid in their deep 
shades the rich soil which no sun had ever warmed. No 
axe had leveled the giant progeny of the crowded 
groves, in which the fantastic forms of limbs, w^ithered 
or riven by lightning, contrasted strangely with the ver- 
dure of a younger growth of branches. The wanton 
grape vine, fastening its leafy coils to the toj) of the 
tallest forest tree, swung with every breeze, like the 
loosened shrouds of a ship. Trees might everywhere be 
seen breaking from their roots in the marshy soil, and 
threatening to fall with the first rude gust ; while the 
ground was strown with the remains of former woods, 



38 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

over which a profusion of wild flowers wasted their 
freshness in mockery of the gloom. Reptiles sported in 
the stagnant pools, or crawled unharmed over piles of 
moldering logs. The spotted deer couched among the 
thickets ; and there were none but wild animals to crop 
the uncut herbage of the prairies. Silence reigned, 
broken, it may have been, by the flight of land birds or 
the flapping of water fowl, and rendered more dismal by 
the howling of beasts of prey. The streams, not yet 
limited to a channel, spread over sand bars, tufted with 
copses of willow, or waded through wastes of reeds ; or 
slowly but surely undermined the groups of sycamores 
that grew by their side. The smaller brooks spread out 
into sedgy swamps, that were overhung by clouds of 
mosquitoes ; masses of decaying vegetation fed the ex- 
halations with the seeds of pestilence, and made the 
balmy air of the summer's evening as deadly as it seemed 
grateful. Life and death were hideously mingled. The 
horrors of corruption frowned on the fruitless fertility of 
uncultivated nature. 

And man, the occupant of the soil, was untamed as 
the savage scene, in harmony with the rude nature by 
which he was surrounded ; a vagrant over the continent, 
in constant warfare with his fellow man ; the bark of the 
birch his canoe ; strings of shells his ornaments, his rec- 
ord, and his coin ; the roots of uncultivated plants among 
his resources for food ; his knowledge in architecture 
surpassed both in strength and durability by the skill of 
the beaver ; bended saplings the beams of his house ; 
the branches and rind of trees its roof ; drifts of leaves 
his couch ; mats of bulrushes his protection against the 
winter's cold ; his religion the adoration of nature ; his 
morals the promptings of undisciplined instinct ; disput- 
ing with the wolves and bears the lordship of the soil, 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 39 

and dividinp; with the S(|uirrel the wild fruits with which 
the universal woodlands abounded. 

The history of a country is modified by its climate, 
and, in many of its features, determined by its geograph- 
ical situation. The region which Hudson had discovered 
possessed near the sea an unrivaled harbor ; a river that 
admits the tide far into the interior on the north ; the 
chain of great lakes, which have their springs in the 
heart of the continent ; within its own limits the sources 
of rivers that flow to the gulfs of Mexico and St. Law- 
rence, and to the bays of Chesapeake and Delaware ; of 
which, long before Europeans anchored ott" Sandy Hook, 
the warriors of the Five Nations availed themselves in 
their excursions to Quebec, to the Ohio, or the Suscpie- 
lianna. With just sufficient difficulties to irritate, and 
not enough to dishearten. New York united richest lands 
with the highest adaptation to foreign and domestic 
commerce. 

How changed is the scene from the wild country on 
which Hudson gazed ! The earth glows with the colors 
of civilization ; the meadows are enameled with choicest 
grasses ; woodlands and cultivated fields are harmo- 
niously blended ; the birds of spring And their delight in 
orchards and trim gardens, variegated with selected 
plants from every temperate zone ; while the brilliant 
flowers of the tropic bloom from the windows of the 
greenhouse, or mock at winter in the salon. The yeo- 
man, living like a good neighbor near the fields he culti- 
vates, glories in the fruitfulness of the valleys, and 
counts with honest exultation the flocks and herds that 
browse in safety on the hills. The thorn has given way 
to the rosebush ; the cultivated vine clambers over rocks 
where the brood of serpents used to nestle ; while indus- 
try smiles at the changes she has wrought, and inhales 
the bland air which now has health on its wings. 



40 SELECTIONS FR03I THE WRITINGS 

And man is still in harmony with nature, which he 
has subdued, developed, and adorned. For him the 
rivers that flow to remotest climes mingle their waters ; 
for him the lakes gain new outlets to the ocean ; for him 
the arch spans the flood, and science spreads iron path- 
ways to the recent wilderness ; for him the hills yield up 
the shining marble and the enduring granite ; for him 
immense rafts bring down the forests of the interior; 
for him the marts of the city gather the produce of all 
climes, and libraries collect the works of every language 
and age. The passions of society are chastened into 
purity, manners are made benevolent by reflnement, and 
the virtue of the country is the guardian of its peace. 
Science investigates the powers of every plant and min- 
eral, to And medicines for disease; schools of surgery 
rival the establishments of the Old World: the genius 
of letters begins to unfold his powers in the warm sun- 
shine of public favor. An active daily jjress, vigilant 
from party interests, free even to dissoluteness, watches 
the progress of society, and communicates every fact 
that can interest humanity; and commerce pushes its 
wharfs into the sea, blocks up the wide rivers with its 
fleets, and sends its ships, the pride of naval architecture, 
to every zone. — Vol. II., Page SS. 



SELECTION XIII. 

FRANKLIN. 

On the deep foundations of soljriety, frugality, and 
industry, the young journeyman built his fortunes and 
fame ; and he soon came to have a printing office of his 
own. Toiling early and late, with his own hands he set 
types and worked at the press ; with his own hands would 
trundle to the office in a wheelbarrow the reams of paper 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 41 

which he was to use. His ingenuity M'as such he could 
form letters, make types and woodcuts, and engrave 
vignettes in copper. The assembly of Pennsylvania 
chose him its printer. Pie planned a newspaper; and 
when he became its proprietor and editor, he defended 
freedom of thought and speech, and the inalienable 
power of the people. He proposed improvements in the 
schools of Philadelphia, invented the s^'stem of subscrip- 
tion libraries, and laid the foundation of one that was 
long the most considerable library in America; he sug- 
gested the establishment of an academy, which has 
ripened into a university ; he saw the benelit of concert 
in the pursuit of science, and gathered a philosophical 
society for its advancement. The intelligent and highly 
cultivated Logan bore testimony to his merits : " Our 
most ingenious printer has the clearest understanding, 
with extreme modesty. He is certainly an extraordinary 
man " ; "• of a singularly good judgment, but of equal 
modesty"; "excellent, yet humble." "Do not imagine," 
he adds, "that I overdo in my character of Benjamin 
Franklin, for I am rather short i)i it." 

When the students of nature began to investigate the 
wonders of electricity, Franklin excelled all observers in 
the simplicity and lucid exposition of his experiments, 
and in " sagacity and power of scientific generalization." 
It was he who first suggested the explanation of thunder 
gusts and the northern lights on electrical principles, and 
in the summer of 1752, going out into the fields, with no 
instrument but a kite, no companion but his son, estab- 
lished his theory by obtaining a line of connection with 
a thunder cloud. Kor did he cease till he had made 
the lightning a household pastime, taught his family to 
catch the subtle fluid in its leaps between the earth and 
the sky, and ascertained how it might be compelled to 
pass harmlessly over the dwellings of men. 



42 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

Franklin looked quietly and deeply into the secrets of 
nature. His clear understanding was never perverted by 
passion, nor corrupted by the pride of theory. The son 
of a rigid- Calvinist, the grandson of a tolerant Quaker, 
he had from boyhood been familiar not only with theo- 
logical subtleties, but with a catholic respect for freedom 
of mind. Skeptical of tradition as the basis of faith, he 
respected reason rather tlian authority ; and after a mo- 
mentary lapse into fatalism, he gained with increasing 
years an increasing trust in the overruling providence of 
God. Adhering to none of all the religions in the colo- 
nies, he yet devoutly, though without form, adhered to 
religion. But though famous as a disputant, and having 
a natural aptitude for metaphysics, he obeyed the ten- 
dency of his age, and sought by observation to win an 
insight into the mysteries of being. The best observers 
praise his method most. He so sincerely loved truth, 
that in his pursuit of lier she met him half-way. With- 
out prejudice and without bias, he discerned intuitively 
the identity of the laws of nature with those of which 
humanity is conscious; so that his mind was like a 
mirror, in which the universe as it reflected itself, re- 
vealed her laws. His morality, repudiating ascetic sever- 
ities, and the system which enjoins them, was indulgent 
to appetites of which he abhorred the sway ; but his affec- 
tions were of a calm intensity; in all his career, the love 
of man held the mastery over personal interest. He 
had not the imagination which inspires the bard or kin- 
dles the orator ; but an exquisite propriety, parsimonious 
of ornament, gave ease, correctness, and graceful sim- 
plicity even to his most careless writings. In life, also, 
his tastes were delicate. Indifferent to the pleasures of 
the table, he relished the delights of music and harmony, 
of which he enlarged the instruments. His blandness of 
temper, his modesty, the benignity of his manners, made 



OF GEORGE BANCROET. 43 

]iini the favorite of intelligent society ; and with healthy 
cheerfulness, he derived pleasure from books, from phi- 
losophy, fi'om conversation, — now administering conso- 
lation to the sorrower, now indulging in light-hearted 
gayety. 

In his intercourse, the universality of his perceptions 
bore, perhaps, the character of humor ; but, while he 
clearly discerned the contrast between the grandeur of 
the universe and the feebleness of man, a serene benevo- 
lence saved him from contempt of his race, or disgust at 
its toils. To superficial observers he might have seemed 
as an alien from speculative truth, limiting himself to 
the world of the senses ; and yet, in study, and among 
men, his mind always sought to discover and apply the 
genei'al principles by which nature and affairs are con- 
trolled — now deducing from the theory of caloric im- 
provements in fireplaces and lanterns, and now advanc- 
ing human freedom by firm inductions from the inalien- 
able rights of man. Never professing enthusiasm, never 
making a parade of sentiment, his practical wisdom was 
sometimes mistaken for the offspring of selfish prudence ; 
yet his hope was steadfast, like that hope which rests on 
the Rock of Ages, and his conduct was as unerring as 
though tlie light that led him was a light from heaven. 
lie never anticipated action by theories of self-sacrificing 
virtue; and yet, in the moments of intense activity, he, 
from the abodes of ideal truth, l)rought down and applied 
to the affairs of life the j)rincipies of goodness, as unos- 
tentatiously as became the man wdio, with a kite and 
hempen string, drew the lightning from the skies. He 
separated himself so little from his age that he has been 
called the representative of materialism ; and yet, when 
he thought on religion, his mind passed beyond reliance 
on sects to faith in God ; when he wax)te on politics, he 
founded freedom on principles that know no change ; 



44 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

when he turned an observing eye on nature, lie passed 
from the effect to the cause, from individual appearances 
to universal laws ; when he reflected on history, liis 
philosophic mind found gladness and repose in the clear 
anticipation of the progress of humanity. — Vol. IL, Page 
638. 



SELECTION XIY. 

LEXINGTON. 

On the 10th of April, just after midnight, the mes- 
sage from Warren reached Adams and Hancock, who at 
once divined the object of the expedition. Revere, 
therefore, and Dawes, joined by Samuel Prescott, "a 
high Son of Liberty," from Concord, rode forward, call- 
ing up the inhabitants as they passed along, till in Lin- 
coln they fell upon a j)arty of British officers. Revere 
and Dawes were seized and taken back to Lexington, 
where they were released ; but Prescott leaped over a 
low stone wall, and galloped on for Concord. 

There, at al)out two in the morning, a peal from the 
belfry of the meeting house brought together the inhalji- 
tants of the place, young and old, with their flrelocks, 
ready to make good the resolute words of their town 
debates. 

Among ilie most alert was William Emerson, the 
minister, with gun in hand, his powder horn and pouch 
of balls slung over his shoulder. By his sermons and 
his prayers, he had so hallowed the enthusiasm of his 
flock that they held the defense of tlieir liberties a part 
of their covenant with God ; his j^i'esence witli arms 
strengthened tlieir sense of duty. 

From daybreak to sunrise, the summons ran from 
house to house through Acton. Express messengers and 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 45 

the call of minute men spread widely the alarm. How 
children trembled as they were scared out of sleep by 
the cries ! How women, with heaving breasts, bravely 
seconded their husbands ! How the countrymen, forced 
suddenly to arms, without guides or counselors, took 
instant counsel of their courage ! The mighty chorus of 
voices i-ose fi-om the scattered farm houses, and, as it 
were, from the very ashes of the dead. Come forth, 
champions of liberty ; now free your country ; protect 
your sons and daughters, your wives and homesteads ; 
rescue the houses of the God of your fathers, the fran- 
chises handed down from your ancestoi-s. Now all is at 
stake ; the battle is for all. * * * 

At two in the morning, under the eye of the minister, 
and 'of Hancock and Adams, Lexington common was 
alive with the minute men ; and not with them only, but 
with the old men also, who were exempts, except in case 
of immediate danger to the town. The roll was called, 
and, of militia and alarm men, about one hundred and 
thirty answered to their names. The captain, John Par- 
ker, ordered every one to load with powder and ball, but 
to take care not to be the first to fire. Messengers, sent 
to look for the British regulars, reported that there were 
no signs of their approach. A watch w^as therefore set, 
and the company dismissed, with orders to come together 
at beat of drum. Some went to their own homes ; some 
to the tavern, near the southeast corner of the common. 
Adams and Hancock, whose proscription had already 
been divulged, and whose seizure was believed to be 
intended, was persuaded to retire toward Woburn. 

The last stars were vanishing from night, when the 
foremost party, led l)y Pitcairn, a major of marines, was 
discovered advancing quickly and in silence. Alarm 
guns were fired, and the drums beat, not a call to village 
husbandmen only, l)ut the reveille to humanity. Less 



46 SELECTIONS FE03I THE WHITINGS 

than seventy, perhaps less than sixty, obeyed the sum- 
mons, and, in sight of lialf as many boys and unarmed 
men, were paraded in two ranks a few rods north of the 
meeting house. 

How often in that buiUling had they, with renewed 
professions of their faith, looked up to God as the stay of 
their fathers and the protector of their privileges ! How 
often on that village green, hard by the burial place of 
their forefathers, had they pledged themselves to each 
other to com])at manfully for their birthright inheritance 
of liberty ! There they now stood side by side, under 
the provincial banner, with arms in their hands, silent and 
fearless, willing to fight for their privileges, scrupulous 
not to begin civil war, and unsuspicious of immediate 
danger. The ground on which the}" trod was the altar of 
freedom, and they were to furnish the victims. 

The British van, hearing the drum and the alarm guns, 
halted to load ; the remaining companies came uj) ; and, 
at half an hour before sunrise, the advance party hurried 
forward at double-quick time, almost upon a run, closely 
followed by the grenadiers. Pitcairn rode in front, and, 
when within hve or six rods of the minute men, cried 
out : " Disperse, ye villains ! ye rel)els, disperse ! lay 
down your arms ! Why don't you lay down your arms 
and disperse ? " The main part of the countrymen stood 
motionless in the ranks, witnesses against aggression, too 
few to resist, too brave to fly. At this, Pitcairn dis- 
charged a pistol, and with a loud voice cried, " Fire ! " 
The order was followed first by a few guns, which did no 
execution, and by a close and deadly discharge of mus- 
ketry. 

In the disparity of numbers, Parker ordered his men 
to disperse. Then, and not till then, did a few of them, 
on their own impulse, return the British fire. These 
random shots of fugitives or dying men did no harm, 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 47 

excei3t that Pitcairn's liorse was perhaps grazed, and a 
private of the tenth light infantry was touched sliglitly 
in the leg. 

Jonas Pai-ker, the strongest and best wrestler in Lex- 
ington, had promised never to run from British troops ; 
and he kept his vow. A wound brouglit him on his 
knees. Having discharged his gun, he was preparing to 
load it again, when as sound a heart as ever throbbed for 
freedom was stilled by a bayonet, and he lay on the post 
which he took at the morning's drum-beat. So fell Isaac 
Muzzey, and so died the aged Robert Munroe, the same 
who in 1758 had been an ensign at Louisburg. Jonathan 
Harrington, Jr., was struck in front of his own house on 
the north of the common. His wife was at the window 
as he fell. With blood gushing from his breast, he rose 
in her sight, tottered, fell again, then crawled on hands 
and knees toward his dwelling ; she ran to meet him, but 
only reached him as he expired on the threshold. Caleb 
Harrington, who had gone into the meeting house for 
powder, was shot as he came out. Samuel Hadley and 
John Brown were pursued and killed after they had left 
the green. Asahel Porter, of Woburn, who had been 
taken prisoner by the British on the march, endeavoring 
to escape, was shot within a few rods of the common. 

Day came in all the beauty of an early spring. The 
trees were budding; the grass growing rankly a full 
month before its time ; the blue bird and the robin glad- 
dening the genial season, and calling forth the beams of the 
sun which on that morning shone with tlie warmth of 
summer ; l)ut distress and horror gathered over the inhab- 
itants of the peaceful town. There on the green lay in 
death, the gray-haired and the young ; the gi-assy field 
was red "with the innocent blood of their brethren 
slain," crying unto God for vengeance from the ground. 
Seven of the men of Lexington were killed, nine 



48 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

wounded — a quarter part of all who stood in arms on the 
green. These are the. village heroes, who were more than 
of noble blood, proving by their spirit that they were of 
a race divine. They gave their lives in testimony to the 
rights of mankind, bequeathing to their country an 
assurance of success in the mighty struggle which they 
began. Their names are had in grateful remembrance, 
and the expanding millions of their countrymen renew 
and multiply their praise from generation to generation. 
They fulfilled their duty not from the accidental impulse 
of the moment ; their action was the shjwly ripened fruit 
of Providence and of time. The light that led them on 
was coml)ined of rays from the whole history of the race ; 
from the traditions of the Hebrews in the gray of the 
world's morning ; from the heroes and sages of republi- 
can Greece and Rome ; from the example of Him who 
died on the cross for humanity; from the religious creed 
which proclaimed the divine presence in man, and on this 
truth, as in a life boat, floated the liberties of nations over 
the dark flood of the middle ages ; from the customs of 
the Germans transmitted out of their forests to the coun- 
cils of Saxon England ; from the burning faith and 
courage of Martin Luther ; from trust in the inevitable 
universality of God's sovereignty as taught by Paul of 
Tarsus and Augustine, through Calvin and the divines 
of I^ew England ; from the avenging fierceness of the 
Puritans, who dashed the miter on the ruins of the 
throne ; from the bold dissent and creative self-assertion 
of the earliest emigrants to Massachusetts ; from the 
statesmen who made, and the philosophers who ex- 
pounded, the revolution of England ; from the liberal 
spirit and analyzing inquisitiveness of the eighteenth 
century ; from the cloud of witnesses of all the ages to 
the reality and rightfulness of human freedom. All the 
centuries bowed themselves from the recesses of the past 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 49 

to cheer in tlieir sacriiice the lowly men who jDrovecl 
themselves worthy of their forernnners, and whose chil- 
dren rise np and call them blessed. 

Heedless of his own danger, Sanniel Adams, wath the 
voice of a prophet, exclaimed : " Oh, what a glorious 
morning is this ! " for he saw^ his country's independence 
hastening on, and, like Colnmbns in the tempest, knew 
that the storm did but bear him the more swiftly toward 
the undiscovered world. — Vol. IV., Page 517. 



SELECTION XV. 



WASHINGTON. 



Washington was then forty-three years of age. In 
stature he a little exceeded six feet ; his limbs were 
sinewy and well proportioned ; his chest broad ; his fig- 
ure stately, blending dignity of presence with ease. His 
robust constitution had been tried and invigorated by his 
early life in the wilderness, the habit of occupation out 
of doors, and rigid temperance ; so that few equaled him 
in strength of arm, or power of endurance, or noble 
horsemanship. His complexion was florid ; his hair dark 
brown ; his head in its shape perfectly round. His 
broad nostrils seemed formed to give expression and 
escape to scornful anger. His eyebrows were rayed and 
finely arched. His dark-blue eyes, which were deeply set, 
had an expression of resignation, and an earnestness that 
was almost pensiveness. His forehead was sometimes 
marked with thought, but never with inquietude ; his 
countenance was mild and pleasing and full of benignity. 

At eleven years old left an orphan to the care of an 
excellent but unlettered mother, he grew up without 
learning. Of arithmetic and geometry he acquired just 
knowledge enough to practice measuring land, but all 



50 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

his instructions at school tauglit him not so mnch as tiie 
orthography or rules of grammar of his own tongue. 
His culture was altogether his own work, and he was in 
the strictest sense a self-made man ; yet from his early 
life he never seemed uneducated. At sixteen, he went 
into the wilderness as a surveyor, and for three years con- 
tinued the pursuit, where the forests trained him, in 
meditative solitude, to freedom and largeness of mind, 
and nature revealed to him her obedience to serene and 
silent laws. In his intervals from toil, he seemed always 
to be attracted to the best men, and to be cherished by 
them. Fairfax, his employer, an Oxford scholar, already 
aged, became his fast friend. He read little, but with 
close attention. Whatever he took in hand, he applied 
himself to with care, and his papers, which have been 
preserved, show how he almost imperceptibly gained the 
power of writing correctly, always expressing himself 
with clearness and directness, often with felicity of lan- 
guage and grace. 

When the frontiers on the west became disturbed, he 
at nineteen was commissioned an adjutant-general with 
the rank of major. At twenty-one he w^ent as the envoy 
of Yirginia to the council of Indian chiefs on the Ohio 
and to the French officers near Lake Erie. 

Fame waited upon him from his youth, and no one of 
his colony was so much spoken of. He conducted the 
first military expedition from Virginia that crossed the 
Alleghanies. Braddock selected him as an aid, and he 
was the only man who came out of the disastrous defeat 
near the Monongahela, with increased reputation, which 
extended to England. The next year, when he was but 
f our-and-twenty, " the great esteem " in which he was 
held in Yirginia, and his " real merit," led the lieuten- 
ant-governor of Maryland to request that he might be 
" commissionated and appointed second in command " of 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 51 

the army designed to iiiareli to the Oliio, and Shirley, 
the commander in chief, heard the proposal " with great 
satisfaction and pleasure," for " he knew no provincial 
upon the continent to whom he would so readily give 
that rank as to Washington." In 1758 he acted under 
Forbes as a brigadier,.and but for him that general would 
never have crossed the mountains. 

Courage was so natural to him that it was hardly 
spoken of to his praise ; no one ever at any moment of 
his life discovered in him the least shrinking in danger, 
and he had a hardihood of daring which escaped notice, 
because it was so enveloped by superior calmness and 
wisdom. 

His address was most easy and agreeable ; his step 
firm and graceful ; his air neither grave nor familiar. 
He was as cheerful as he was spirited, frank and commu- 
nicative in the society of his friends, fond of the fox 
chase and the dance, often sportive in his letters, and 
liked a hearty laugh. 

" His smile," writes Chastellux, " was always the 
smile of benevolence." This joyousness of disposition 
remained to the last, though the vastness of his responsi- 
bility was soon to take from him the right of displaying 
the impulsive qualities of his nature, and the weight 
which he was to bear up was to overlay and repress his 
gayety and openness. 

His hand was liberal ; giving quietly and without 
observation, as though he was ashamed of nothing but 
being discovered in doing good. He was kindly and 
compassionate, and of lively sensibility to the sorrows of 
others ; so that, if his country had only needed a victim 
for its relief, he would have willingly offered himself as a 
sacrifice. But while he was prodigal of himself, he was 
considerate for others ; ever parsimonious of the blood of 
his countrymen. 



52 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

He was prudent in the management of his private 
affairs, purchased rich lands from the Mohawk valley to 
the flats of the Kanawha, and improved his fortune by 
the correctness of his judgment ; but, as a public man, 
he knew no other aim than the good of his country, and 
in the hour of his country's poverty he refused personal 
emolument for his service. 

His faculties were so well balanced and combined 
that his constitution, free from excess, was tempered 
evenly with all the elements of activity, and his mind 
resembled a well ordered commonwealth ; his passions, 
which had the intensest vigor, owned allegiance to reason, 
and with all the fiery quickness of his spirit, his impetu- 
ous and massive will was held in check by consummate 
judgment. 

He had in his composition a calm, which gave him in 
moments of highest excitement, the power of self-con- 
trol, and enabled him to excel in patience, even when he 
had most cause for disgust. Washington was offered a 
command when there was little to bring out the unorgan- 
ized resources of the continent but his own influence, 
and authority was connected with the people by the most 
frail, most attenuated, scarcely discernible threads ; yet, 
vehement as was his nature, impassioned as was his cour- 
age, he so restrained his ardor that he never failed con- 
tinuously to exert the attracting power of that influence, 
and never exerted it so sharply as to break its force. 

In secrecy he was unsurpassed ; but his secrecy had 
the character of prudent reserve, not of cunning or con- 
cealment. His great natural power of vigilance had been 
developed by his life in the wilderness. 

His understanding was lucid, and his judgment ac- 
curate ; so that his conduct never betrayed hurry or con- 
fusion. No detail was too minute for his personal inquiry 
and continued supervision ; and at the same time he com- 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 53 

prehended events in their widest aspects and relations. 
He never seemed above the object that engaged his atten- 
tion, and he was always equal, without an effort, to the 
solution of the highest questions, even when there ex- 
isted no precedents to guide his decision. In the perfec- 
tion of the reflective powers, which he used habitually, 
he had no peer. 

In this way he never drew to himself admiration for 
the possession of any one quality in excess, never made 
in council any one suggestion that was sublime but im- 
practicable, never in action took to himself the praise or 
the blame of undertakings astonishing in conception, but 
beyond his means of execution. It was the most won- 
derful accomplishment of this man, that, placed upon 
the largest theater of events, at the head of the gi-eatest 
revolution in human affairs, he never failed to observe 
all that was possible, and at the same time to bound his 
aspirations by that which was possible. 

A slight tinge in his character, perceptible only to the 
close observer, revealed the region from which he sprung, 
and he might be described as the best specimen of man- 
hood as developed in the south ; but his qualities were 
so faultlessly proportioned, that his whole country rather 
claimed him as its choicest representative, the most com- 
plete expression of all its attainments and aspirations. 
He studied his country, and conformed to it. His coun- 
trymen felt that he was the best type of America, and 
rejoiced in it, and were proud of it. They lived in his 
life, and made his success and his praise their own. 

Profoundly impressed with confldence in God's provi- 
dence, and exemplary in his respect for the forms of 
public worship, no philosopher of the eighteenth century 
was more firm in the support of freedom of religious 
opinion, none more remote from bigotry ; but belief in 
God, and trust in his overruling power, formed the 



54 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

essence of his character. Divine wisdom not only ilhi- 
mines the spirit, it inspires the will. Washington was a 
man of action, and not of theory or words ; his creed 
appears in his life, not in his professions, which bnrst 
from him very rarely, and only at those great moments 
of crisis in the fortnnes of his country, when earth and 
heaven seemed actually to meet, and his emotions became 
too intense for suppression ; but his whole being was one 
continued act of faith in the eternal, intelligent, moral 
order of the universe. Integrity was so completely the 
law of his nature, that a planet would sooner have shot 
from its sphere than he have departed from his upright- 
ness, which was so constant that it often seemed to l)e 
almost impersonal. " His integrity was the most pure, 
his justice the most inflexible I have ever known," writes 
Jefferson ; " no motives of interest or consanguinity, of 
friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision." 

They say of Giotto, that he introduced goodness into 
the art of painting. Washington carried it with him to 
the camp and the cabinet, and established a new criterion 
of human greatness. The purity of his will confirmed his 
fortitude ; and as he never faltered in his faith in virtue, 
he stood fast by that which he knew to be just ; free 
from illusions ; never dejected by the apprehension of 
the difficulties and perils that went before him, and draw- 
ing the promise of success from the justice of his cause. 
Hence he was persevering, leaving nothing unfinished ; 
devoid of all taint of obstinacy in his firmness ; seeking 
and gladly receiving advice, but immovable in his de- 
voted ness to right. 

Of a "retiring modesty and habitual reserve," his 
ambition was no more than the consciousness of his 
power, and was subordinate to his sense of duty ; he 
took the foremost place, for he knew, from inborn mag- 
nanimity, that it belonged to him, and he dared not with- 



_ OF GEORGE BANCROFT. ^0 

hold the service required of him ; so that, with all his 
humility, he was by necessity the first, though never for 
himself or for private ends. He loved fame, the ap- 
proval of coming generations, the good opinion of his 
fellow-men of his own time, and he desired to make his 
conduct coincide with their wishes ; but not fear of cen- 
sure, not the prospect of applause, could tempt him to 
swerve from rectitude, and the praise which he coveted 
was the sympathy of that moral sentiment which exists 
in every human breast, and goes forth only to the wel- 
come of virtue. 

There have been soldiers who have achieved mightier 
victories in the field, and made conquests more nearly 
corresponding to the boundlessness of selfish ambition ; 
statesmen who have been connected with more startling 
upheavals of society. But it is the greatness of Washing- 
ton that in public trusts he used power solely for the 
public good ; that he was the life and moderator and 
stay of the most momentous revolution in human affairs, 
its moving impulse, and its restraining power. Combin- 
ing the centripetal and the centrifugal forces in their 
utmost strength, and in perfect relations, with creative 
grandeur of instinct, he held ruin in check, and renewed 
and perfected the institutions of his country. Finding 
the colonies disconnected and dependent, he left them 
such a united and well ordered commonwealth as no 
visionary had believed to be possible ; so that it has 
been truly said : " He was as fortunate as great and 
good." 

This also is the praise of Washington : that never in 
the tide of time has any man lived who had in so great 
a degree the almost divine faculty to command the con- 
fidence of his fellow men and rule the wilKng. Wher- 
ever he became known — in his family, his neighbor- 
hood, his county, his native state, the continent, the camp, 



56 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

civil life, among the common people, in foreign courts, 
throughout the civiHzed world, and even among the sav- 
ages — he, beyond all other men, had the conhdence of 
his kind. 

Washington saw at a glance the difficulties of the 
position to which he had been chosen. He was appointed 
by a government which, in its form, was one of the worst 
of all possible governments in time of peace, and was 
sure to reveal its defects still more plainly in time of 
war. It was inchoate and without an executive head ; 
the several branches of administration, if to be conducted 
at all, were to be conducted by separate, ever-changing, 
and irresponsible committees ; and all questions of legis- 
lation and of action ultimately decided by the one ill- 
organized body of men Avho, in respect of granted 
powers, were too feeble even to originate advice. They 
were not the representatives of a union ; they alone con- 
stituted the union, of which, as yet, there was no other 
bond. One whole department of government, the judi- 
cial, was entirely wanting. So was, in truth, the execu- 
tive. The congress had no ability whatever to enforce a 
decree of their own; they had no revenue, and no 
authority to collect a revenue; they had none of the 
materials of war; they did not own a cannon, nor a 
pound of powder, nor a tent, nor a musket; they had 
no regularly enlisted army, and had even a jealousy of 
forming an army, and depended on the zeal of volun- 
teers, or of men to be enlisted for less than seven 
months. There were no experienced officers, and no 
methods projected for obtaining them. Washington saw 
it all. He was in the enjoyment of fame ; he wished 
not to forfeit the esteem of his fellow men ; and his eye 
glistened with a tear as he said in confidence to Patrick 
Henry on occasion of his appointment : " This day will 
be the commencement of tlie decline of my reputation." 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 57 

But this consideration did not make liim waver. On 
the sixteenth of June lie appeared in liis place in congress, 
and after refusing all pay beyond his expenses, he spoke 
with unfeigned modesty ; "As the congress desire it, I 
will enter upon the momentous duty, and exert every 
power I possess in their service, and for the support of 
the glorious cause. But I beg it may be remembered by 
every gentleman in the room, that I this da^' declare, 
with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to 
the command I am honored with." 

The next day, the delegates of all the colonies re- 
solved unanimously "to maintain and assist him, and 
adhere to him, the said George Washington, Esquire, 
with their lives and fortunes in the same cause." 

By his commission he was invested with the command 
over all forces raised or to be raised by the United Colo- 
nies, and with full power and authority to order the 
army as he should think for the good and welfare of the 
service, "in unforeseen emergencies using his best cir- 
cumspection, and advising with his council of war"; 
and he was instructed to take "special care that the 
liberties of America receive no detriment," 

Washington knew that he must depend for success on 
a steady continuance of purjDose in an imperfectly united 
continent, and on his personal influence over separate 
and half-formed governments, with most of which he 
was wholly unacquainted. He foresaw a long and ar- 
duous struggle ; but a secret consciousness of his power 
bade him not to fear ; and, whatever might be the back- 
wardness of others, he never admitted the thought of 
sheathing his sword or resigning his command till the 
work of vindicating American liberty should be done. 
To his wnfe he unbosomed his inmost mind . " I hope my 
undertaking this service is designed to answer some 
good purpose. I rely confidently on that Providence 



I 



58 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

which has heretofore preserved and been honntiful to 
me." 

His acceptance changed the aspect of affairs. John 
Adams, looking witli complacency ujjon "the modest 
and virtnous, the amiable, generons, and brave general," 
as the choice of Massachusetts, said : " This appointment 
will have a great effect in cementing the union of these 
colonies." " The general is one of the most important 
characters of the world ; upon him depend the liberties 
of America." All hearts turned with affection toward 
Washington. This is he who was raised U]) to be, not 
the head of a party, but the father of his country. — 
Vol. IV., Page 593. 



SELECTION XVI. 

JOHN ADAMS. 

On the ninth day of February John Adams resumed 
his seat in congress, with Elbridge Gerry for a colleague, 
in place of the feeble Gushing, and with instructions 
from his constituents to establish liberty in America upon 
a permanent basis. His nature was robust and manly ; 
now he was in the happiest mood of mind for asserting 
the independence of his country. He had confidence in 
the ability of New England to drive away their enemy ; 
in Washington, as a brave and prudent commander ; in 
his wife, who cheered him with the fortitude of womanly 
heroism; in the cause of his country, which seemed so 
bound up with the welfare of mankind that Providence 
could not suffer its defeat ; in himself, for his convictions 
were clear, his will fixed, and his mind prepared to let 
his little property and his life go, sooner than the rights 
of his country. 

Looking into himself, he saw weaknesses enough, but 



p 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 59 



neither meanness nor dishonesty nor timidity. His 
overweening self-esteem was his chief blemisli, and, if he 
compared himself with his great fellow workers, there 
was some j^oint on which he was superior to any one of 
them ; he had more learning than Washington, or any 
other American statesman of his age ; better knowledge 
' of freedom as grounded in law than Samuel Adams ; 
clearer insight into the constructive elements of govern- 
ment than Franklin ; more power in debate than Jeffer- 
son ; more courageous manliness than Dickinson ; more 
force in motion than Jay ; so that, by varying and con- 
fining his comparisons, he could easily fancy himself the 
greatest of them all. He was capable of thinking him- 
self the center of any circle, to which he had been no 
more than a tangent ; his vanity was in such excess that 
in manhood it sometimes confused his judgment, and in 
age bewildered his memory; but the stain did not reach 
beyond the surface ; it impaired the luster, not the hardy 
integrity of his character. He was humane and frank, 
generous and clement ; if he could never sit placidly 
under the shade of a greater reputation than his own, his 
envy, though it laid open how deeply his self-love was 
wounded, had hardly a tinge of malignity. He did his 
fame injustice when, later in life, he represented himself 
as suffering from persecutions on account of his early 
zeal for independence ; he was no weakling to whine 
about injured feelings ; he went to his task, sturdy and 
cheery and brave ; he was the hammer, and not the 
anvil, and it was for others to fear his prowess and to 
shrink under his blows. His courage was unflinching in 
debate, and everywhere else ; he never knew what fear 
was ; and had he gone into the army, as he once longed 
to do, he would have taken there the virtues of temper- 
ance, decision, and intrepidity. To his latest old age, 
his spirit was robust, buoyant, and joyous ; he saw ten 



60 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

times as much pleasure as pain in the world ; and, after 
his arm quivered and his eye grew dim, he was ready to 
hegin life anew and iight its battle over again. 

In his youth he fell among skeptics, read Boling- 
broke's works five times through, and accustomed him- 
self to reason freely and think boldly ; he esteemed him- 
self a profound metaphysician, but had only skimmed the 
speculations of others ; though at first destined to be a 
minister, he became a rebel to Calvinism, and never had 
any very fixed religious creed. For all that, he was a 
stanch man of New England, and his fond partiality to 
its people, its institutions, its social condition, and its 
laws, followed him into congress and its committees and 
social life, tinctured his judgment, and clinched his pre- 
possessions; but the elements in New England that he 
loved most were those which were eminently friendly to 
universal culture and republican equality. A poor farm- 
er's son, bent on making his way in the world, at twenty 
years old beginning to earn his own bread, pinched and 
starved as master of a " stingy " country school, he formed 
early habits of order and frugality, and steadily advanced 
to fortune ; but, though exact in his accounts, there was 
nothing niggardly in his thrift, and his modest hospi- 
tality was prompt and hearty. He loved homage, and 
it made him blind ; to those who flattered him he gave 
his confidence freely, and often unwisely, and while he 
watched the general movement of affairs with compre- 
hensive sagacity, he was never a calm observer of indi- 
vidual men. He was of the choleric temperament, of a 
large and compact frame ; he was singularly sensitive ; 
could break out into uncontrollable rage, and never 
learned to rule his own spirit ; but his anger did not so 
much drive him to do wrong as to do right ungraciously. 
No man was less fitted to gain his end by arts of indirec- 
tion ; he knew not how to intrigue, was indiscreetly 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 61 

talkative, and almost thought aloud ; his ways of court- 
ing support were uncouth, so that he made few friends 
except by his weight of character and integrity, and was 
unapt as the leader of a party. 

Hating intolerance in all its forms, an impassioned 
lover of civil liberty, as the glory of man and the best 
evidence and the best result of civilization, he, of all men 
in congress, was incomparable as a dogmatist ; essentially 
right-minded ; loving to teach with authority ; pressing 
onward unsparingly with his argument ; impatient of 
contradiction ; unequaled as a positive champion of the 
right. He was the Martin Luther of the American revo- 
lution, compelled to utter his convictions fearlessly by 
an inborn energy which forbade his acting otherwise. 
He was now too much in earnest, and too much engaged 
by the greatness of his work to think of himself ; too 
anxiously desiring aid, to disparage those who gave it. 
In the fervor of his activity, his faults disappeared. His 
intellect and public spirit, all the noblest parts of his 
nature, were called into the fullest exercise, and strained 
to the uttermost of their healthful power. Combining, 
more than any other, farness of sight and fixedness of 
belief with courage and power of utterance, he was 
looked up to as the ablest debater in congress. Preserv- 
ing some of the habits of the lawyer, he was redundant 
in words and cumulative in argument ; but his warmth 
and sincerity kept him from the affectations of a pedant 
or a rhetorician. Forbearance was no longer in season ; 
the irrepressible talent of persevering, peremptory asser- 
tion was wanted ; the more he was hurried along by his 
own vehement will, the better; now his country, hu- 
manity, the age, the hour, demanded that the right should 
be spoken out ; his high excitement had not the air of 
passion, but appeared, as it was, the clear perception of 
the sublimity of his task. When, in the life of a states- 



62 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

mail, were six months of more importance to tlie race 
than these six months in the career of John Adams ? — ■ 
Vol. v., Page 206. 



SELECTION XVII. 

ABIGAIL ADAMS. 

In a few weeks tlie proclamation reached tlie colonies 
at several ports. Men said : " While America is still on 
her knees, the king aims a dagger at her heart." Abigail 
Smith, the wife of John Adams, was at the time in their 
home, near the foot of Penn Hill, charged with the sole 
care of their little brood of children ; managing their 
farm ; keeping house with frugality, though opening her 
doors to the houseless, and giving with good will a part 
of her scant portion to the poor ; seeking work for her 
own hands, and ever occupied, now at the spinning- 
wheel, now making amends for having never been sent 
to school by learning French, though with the aid of 
books alone. Since the departure of her husband for 
congress, the arrow of death had sped near her by day, 
and the pestilence that walks in darkness had entered 
her humble mansion ; she herself was still weak after a 
violent illness ; her house was a hospital in every part ; 
and such Avas the distress of the neighborhood, she could 
hardly find a well person to assist in looking after the 
sick. Her youngest son had been rescued from the grave 
by her nursing ; her ow^n mother liad been taken away, 
and, after the austere manner of her forefathers, buried 
without prayer. Woe followed woe, and one affliction 
trod on the heels of another. Winter was hurrying on. 
During the day family affairs took off her attention, but 
her long evenings, broken by the sound of the storm on 
the ocean or the enemy's artillery at Boston, were lone- 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 63 

some and melancholy. Ever in the silent night dwelling 
on the love and tenderness of her departed parent, she 
needed the consolation of her hnsband's presence ; bnt 
when, in November, she read the king's proclamation, 
she willingly gave np her nearest friend to his perilous 
duties, and sent him her cheering message : " This intel- 
ligence will make a plain path for you, though a danger- 
ous one. I could not join to-day in the petitions of our 
worthy pastor for a reconciliation between our no longer 
parent state, but tyrant state, and these colonies. Let us 
separate ; they are unw^orthy to be our brethren. Let us 
renounce them ; and instead of supplications, as for- 
merly, for their prosperity and happiness, let us beseech 
the Almighty to blast their counsels, and bring to naught 
all their devices."— Vol. V., Page 8'B. 



SELECTION XYIII. 

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 

The Declaration of Independence was silently but 
steadily prepared in the convictions of all the jjeople, 
just as every spire of grass is impearled by the dew, and 
reflects the morning sun. The many are more sagacious, 
more disinterested, more courageous than the few. Lan- 
guage was their spontaneous creation ; the science of 
ethics, as the word implies, is deduced from the inspira- 
tions of their conscience ; law itself, as the great jurists 
have perceived, is necessarily molded by their inward 
nature ; the poet embodies in words their oracles and 
their litanies ; the philosopher draws ideal thought from 
the storehouse of their mind ; the national heart is the 
great reservoir of noble resolutions, and of high, endur- 
ing designs. It w^as the common people wdiose craving 
for the recognition of the unity of the universe, and for a 



64 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

perfect mediation between themselves and the Infinite, 
bore the Christian rehgion to its triumph over every 
worldly influence. It was the public faith that, in the 
days of the Reformation, sought abstract truth behind 
forms that had been abused, and outward acts that had 
lost their significance ; and now the popular desire was 
once more the voice of the harbinger, crying in the 
wilderness. The people, whose spirit far outran conven- 
tions and congresses, had grown weary of atrophied in- 
stitutions, and longed to fathom the mystery of tlie life 
of the public life. Instead of continuing a superstitious 
reverence for the scepter and the throne, as the symbols 
of order, they yearned for a nearer converse with the 
eternal rules of right as the generative principles of social 
peace 

Reid, among Scottish metaphysicians, and Chatham, 
the foremost of British statesmen, had discovered in 
COMMON SENSE the Criterion of morals and truth ; the 
common sense of the people now claimed its right to sit 
in judgment on the greatest question ever raised in the 
political world. All the colonies, as though they had 
been but one individual being, felt themselves wounded 
to the soul when they heard, and could no longer doubt, 
that George III. was hiring foreign mercenaries to reduce 
them to subjection. — Vol. V., Page 165. 



SELECTION XIX. 



THOMAS JEFFERSON. 



The resolution of congress changed the old thirteen 
British colonies into free and independent states. It 
remained to set forth the reason for this act, and the 
principles which the new people would own as their 
guides. Of the committee appointed for that duty, 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 65 

Thomas Jefferson, of Yirginia, had received the largest 
number of votes, and was in that manner singled out to 
draft the confession of faith of the rising empire. He 
owed this distinction to respect for the colony which he 
represented, to the consummate ability of the state paj^ers 
which he had already written, and to that general favor 
which follows merit, modesty, and a sweet disposition ; 
but the quality which specially fitted him for the task 
was the sympathetic character of his nature, by wdiich he 
was able, with instinctive perception, to read the soul of 
the nation, and, having collected its best tlioughts and 
noblest feelings, to give them out in clear and bold 
words, mixed with so little of himself that his country, 
as it went along with him, found nothing but what it 
recognized as its own. No man in his century had more 
trust in the collective reason and conscience of his fellow 
men, or better knew how to take tlieir counsel ; and in 
return he came to be a ruler over the willing in the 
world of opinion. Born to an independent fortune, he 
had from his youth been an indefatigable student. "■ The 
glow of one warm thought was worth more to him than 
money." Of a hopeful temperament, and a tranquil, 
philosophic cast of mind, always temperate in his mode 
of life, and decorous in his manners, he was a perfect 
master of his passions. He was of a delicate organiza- 
tion, and fond of elegance ; his tastes were refined ; 
laborious in his application to business or the pursuit of 
knowledge, music, the most spiritual of all pleasures of 
the senses, was his favorite recreation ; and he took a 
never failing delight in the varied beauty of rural life, 
building himself a home in the loveliest region of his 
native state. He was a skillful horseman, and, with 
elastic step, would roam the mountains on foot. The 
range of his studies was very wide ; he was not unfa- 
miliar with the literature of Greece and Rome ; had an 
6 



Q(y SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

aptitude for mathematics and mechanics, and loved es- 
pecially the natural sciences, scorning nothing but meta- 
physics. British governors and officials had introduced 
into "Williamsburg the prevalent free thinking of English- 
men of that centurv, and Jefferson had grown up in its 
atmosphere. He was not only a hater of priestcraft and 
superstition and bigotry and intolerance, he was thought 
to be indifferent to religion ; yet his instincts all inclined 
him to trace every fact to a general law, and to put faith 
in ideal truth ; the world of the senses did not bound his 
aspirations, and he beHeved more than he himself was 
aware of. He was an idealist in his liabits of thought 
and life, as indeed is everyone who has an abiding and 
thorough confidence in the people ; and he was kept so, 
in spite of circumstances, by the irresistible bent of his 
character. He had great power in mastering details, as 
well as in searching for general principles. His profes- 
sion was that of the law, in which he was methodical, 
painstaking, and successful ; at the same time, he pursued 
it as a science, and was well read in the law of nature 
and of nations. Whatever he had to do, it was his 
custom to prepare himself for it carefully ; and in public 
life, when others were at fault, they often found that he 
had already hewed out the way ; so that in council, men 
willingly gave him the lead, which he never appeared to 
claim, and was always able to undertake. But he rarely 
spoke in pu])lic, and was less fit to engage in the war of 
debate than calmly to sum up its conclusions. It was a 
beautiful trait in his character that he was free from 
envy ; had he kept silence, there would have been want- 
ing to John Adams the best witness to his greatness as 
the ablest advocate and defender of independence. A 
common object now riveted the two statesmen together 
in close bonds. I cannot find that at that period Jeffer- 
son had an enemy ; by the general consent of Virginia, 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. B7 

he stood first among her civilians. Just tliirty-three 
years old, married, and happy in his family, affluent, 
with a bright career before him, he was no rash innova- 
tor by his character or his position. If his convictions 
drove him to demand independence, it was only because 
lie could no longer live with honor under the British 
" constitution, which he still acknowledged to be better 
than all that had preceded it." His enunciation of gen- 
eral principles was fearless ; but he was no visionary 
devotee of abstract theories, which, like disembodied 
souls, escape from every embrace. The nursling of his 
country, the offspring of his time, he set about the work 
of a practical statesman, and his measures grew so nat- 
urally out of previous law and the facts of the past that 
they struck deep root, and have endured. 

From the fullness of his own mind, without consult- 
ing one single book, yet having in his mind the example 
of the Swiss and of the United Provinces of the Nether- 
lands, Jefferson drafted the declaration, in which, after 
citing the pnmal principles of government, he presented 
the complaints of the United States against England in 
the three classes of the iniquitous use of the royal prerog- 
ative, the usurpation of legislative power over America 
by the king in parliament, and the measures for enforc- 
ing the pretended acts of legislation. He submitted the 
paper separately to Franklin and to John Adams, accept- 
ed from each of them one or two verbal, unimportant 
corrections, and on the 28th of June reported it to con- 
gress, which now, on the 2d of July, immediately after 
adopting the resolution of independence, entered upon 
its consideration. During the remainder of that day, 
and the next two, the language, the statements, and the 
principles of the paper were closely scanned. — Vol. V, 
Page 322. 



i 



68 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

SELECTION XX. 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
PART I. 

That God rules in the affairs of men is as certain as 
any truth of physical science. On the great moving 
power which is from the beginning hangs the world of 
the senses and the world of thought and action. Eter- 
nal wisdom marshals the great procession of the nations, 
working in patient continuity through the ages, never 
halting and never abrupt, encompassing all events in its 
oversight, and ever effecting its will, though mortals may 
slumber in apathy or oppose with madness. 

Kings are lifted up or thrown down, nations come and 
go, republics flourish and wither, dynasties pass away 
like a tale that is told ; but nothing is by chance, though 
men, in their ignorance of causes, may think so. 

The deeds of time are governed, as well as judged, by 
the decrees of eternity. The caprice of fleeting existences 
bends to the immovable omnipotence, which plants its 
foot on all the centuries and has neither change of pur- 
pose nor repose. Sometimes, like a messenger through 
the thick darkness of night, it steps along its mysterious 
ways ; but when the hour strikes for a people, or for 
mankind, to pass into a new form of being, unseen hands 
draw the bolts from the gates of futurity ; an all-subdu- 
ing influence prepares the minds of men for the coming 
revolution ; those who plan resistance find themselves in 
conflict with the will of Providence rather than with 
human devices; and all hearts and all understandings, 
most of all the opinions and influences of the unwilling, 
are wonderfully attracted and compelled to bear forward 
the change, which becomes more an obedience to the uni- 
versal law of nature than submission to the arbitrament 
of man. 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 69 

In the fullness of time a republic rose up in the wilder- 
ness of America. Thousands of years had passed away 
before this child of the ages could be born. From what- 
ever there was of good in the systems of former centuries 
she drew her nourishment ; the wrecks of the past were her 
warnings. With the deepest sentiment of faith tixed in 
her inmost nature, she disenthralled religion from bondage 
to temporal poVer, that her worship might be worship 
only in sj^irit and in truth. The wisdom which had 
passed from India through Greece, with what Greece 
had added of her own ; the jurisprudence of Rome ; the 
media? val nnmicipalities ; the Teutonic method of repre- 
sentation ; the political expei'ience of England ; the 
benignant wisdom of the expositors of the law of nature 
and of nations in France and Holland, all shed on her 
their selectest influence. She washed the gold of politi- 
cal wisdom from the sands wherever it was found ; she 
cleft it from the rocks ; she gleaned it among ruins. Out 
of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all 
the experience of past human life, she compiled a peren- 
nial political philosophy, the primordial principles of 
national ethics. The wise men of Europe sought the 
best government in a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, 
and democracy ; America went behind these names to 
extract from them the vital elements of social forms, and 
blend them harmoniously in the free commonwealth, 
which comes nearest to the illustration of the natural 
equality of all men. She entrusted the guardianship of 
established rights to law, the movements of reform to 
the spirit of the people, and drew her force from the 
happy reconciliation of both. 

Republics had heretofore been limited to small can- 
tons or cities, and their dependencies; America, doing 
that of which the like had not been known before upon 
the earth, or believed by kings and statesmen to be possi- 



I 



70 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

ble, extended her republic across a continent. Under 
her auspices the vine of hberty took deep root and tilled 
the land ; the hills were covered with its shadow, its 
bonghs were like the goodly cedars, and reached unto 
both oceans. The fame of this only daughter of free- 
dom went out into all the lands of the earth ; from her 
the human race drew hope. 



When eight j^ears old he floated down the Ohio with 
his father on a raft, which bore the family and all their 
possessions to the shore of Indiana ; and, child as he was, 
lie gave help as they toiled through dense forests to the 
interior of Spencer county. There, in the land of free 
labor, he grew up in a log cabin, with the solemn solitude 
for his teacher in his meditative hours. Of Asiatic liter- 
ature he knew only the Bible ; of Greek, Latin, and 
mediaeval no more than the translation of ^sop's Fables ; 
of English, John Banyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The tra- 
ditions of George Fox and William Penn passed to him 
dimly along the lines of two centuries through his ances- 
tors, who were Quakers. 

Otherwise his education was altogether American. 
The Declaration of Independence w^as his compendium 
of political wisdom, the Life of Washington his constant 
study, and something of Jefferson and Madison reached 
him through Henry Clay, whom he honored from boy- 
hood. For the rest, from day to day, he lived the life of 
the American people, walked in its light, reasoned with 
its reason, thought with its power of thought, felt the 
beatings of its mighty heart, and so was in every way a 
child of nature, a child of the West, a child of America. 

At nineteen, feeling impulses of ambition to get on 
in the w^orld, he engaged himself to go down the Missis- 
sippi in a flatboat, receiving ten dollars a month for his 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 71 

wages, and afterward lie made tlie trip once more. At 
twenty-one he drove his father's cattle, as the family mi- 
grated to Illinois, and split rails to fence in the new 
homestead in the wild. At twenty-three he was a ca])- 
tain of vohinteers in the Black Hawk war. He kejDt a 
store. He learned something of surveying, but of English 
literature added nothing to Bunyan but Shakesjjeare's 
plays. At twenty-five he was elected to the legislature 
of Illinois, where he served eight years. At tM^enty- 
seven he was admitted to the bar. In 183T he chose his 
home at Springfield, the beautiful center of the richest 
land in the state. In 1847 he was a member of the 
National Congress, where he voted about forty times in 
favor of the principle of the Jefferson proviso. In 1849 
he sought eagerly but unsuccessfully the place of com- 
missioner of the land office, and he refused an appoint- 
ment that would have transferred his residence to Oregon. 
In 1854 he gave his influence to elect from Illinois to 
the American senate a democrat who would certainly do 
justice to Kansas. In 1858, as the rival of Douglas, he 
went before the people of the mighty Prairie State, say- 
ing : " This Union cannot permanently endure half slave 
and half free ; the Union will not be dissolved, but the 
house will cease to be divided." And now, in 1861, with 
no experience whatever as an executive officer, while 
states were madly flying from their orbit, and wise men 
knew not where to find counsel, this descendant of 
Quakers, this pupil of Bunyan, this offspring of the 
great West was elected President of America. 

He measured the difiiculty of the duty that devolved 
upon him, and was resolved to fulfill it. As on the 
eleventh of February, 1861, he left Springfield, which 
for a quarter of a century had been his happy home, to 
the crowd of his friends and neighbors, whom he was 
never more to meet, he spoke a solemn farewell : " I 



72 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

know not how soon I shall see you again. A duty has 
devolved upon nie, greater than that which has devolved 
upon any otlier nian since Washington. He never would 
have succeeded except for the aid of Divine Providence, 
upon which he at all times relied. On the same Almighty 
Being I place my reliance. Pray that I may receive that 
divine assistance, without which I cannot succeed, but 
with which success is certain." To the men of Indiana 
he said : " I am but an accidental temporary instrument ; 
it is your business to rise up and protect the Union and 
liberty." At the capital of Ohio he said : " Without a 
name, without a reason why I should have a name, there 
has fallen upon me a task such as did not rest even upon 
the Father of his Country." At various places in New 
York, esjjecially at Albany, before the legislature, which 
tendered him the support of the great Empire State, he 
said : " While I hold myself the humblest of all the indi- 
viduals who have ever been elevated to the presidency, I 
have a more difficult task to perform than any of them. 
I bring a true heart to the work. I must rely upon the peo- 
ple of the whole country for support, and wnth their sus- 
taining aid even I, humble as I am, cannot fail to carry the 
ship of state safely through the storm." To the assembly 
of New Jersey, at Trenton, he explained : " I shall take 
the ground I deem most just to the North, the East, the 
West, the South, and the whole country, in good temper, 
certainly, with no malice to any section. I am devoted 
to peace, but it may be necessary to put the foot down 
firmly." In the old Independence Hall, of Philadelphia, 
he said : " I have never had a feeling politically that did 
not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declara- 
tion of Independence, which gave liberty, not alone to 
the people of this country, but to the world in all future 
time. If the country cannot be saved without giving 
up that principle, I would rather l^e assassinated on the 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 73 

spot tliaii siuTender it. I liave said nothing but what I 
am willing to live and die by." 



Hardly had the late President been consigned to the 
grave when the Prime Minister of England died, full of 
years and honors. Palmerston traced his lineage to the 
time of the Conqueror ; Lincoln went back only to his 
grandfather. Palmerston received his education from 
the best scholars of Harrow, Edinburgh, and Cambridge ; 
Lincoln's early teachers were the silent forest, the prairie, 
the river, and the stars. Palmerston was in public life 
for sixty years ; Lincoln for but a tenth of that time. 
Palmerston was a skillful guide of an established aris- 
tocracy ; Lincoln a leader, or rather a companion, of the 
people. Palmerston was exclusively an Englishman, and 
made his boast in the House of Commons that the inter- 
est of England was his shibboleth ; Lincoln thought 
always of mankind, as well as his own country, and 
served human nature itself. Palmerston, from his nar- 
rowness as an Englishman, did not endear his country to 
any one court or to any one nation, but rather caused 
general uneasiness and dislike ; Lincoln left America 
more beloved than ever by all the people of Europe. 
Palmerston was self-possessed and adroit in reconciling 
the conflicting factions of the aristocracy ; Lincoln, frank 
and ingenuous, knew how to poise himself on the ever 
moving opinions of the masses. Palmerston was capal)le 
of insolence toward the weak, quick to the sense of 
honor, not heedful of right ; Lincoln rejected counsel 
given only as a matter of policy, and was not capable of 
being willfully unjust. 

Palmerston, essentially superficial, delighted in banter, 
and knew how to divert grave opposition by playful 
levity ; Lincoln was a man of infinite jest on his lijDS, 



74 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

with saddest earnestness at his lieart. Pahnerston was a 
fair representative of the aristocratic liberaUty of the 
day, clioosing for his tribunal, not the conscience of hu- 
manity, but the House of Commons; Lincoln took to 
lieart the eternal truths of liberty, obeyed them as the 
commands of Providence, and accepted the human race 
as the judge of his fidelity. Pahnerston did nothing 
that will endure ; Lincoln finished a work which all 
time cannot overthrow. Pahnerston is a shining exam- 
ple of the ablest of a cultivated aristocracy ; Lincoln is 
the genuine fruit of institutions where the laboring man 
shares and assists to form the great ideas and designs of 
his country. Pahnerston was buried in Westminster 
Abbey by the order of his Queen, and was attended by 
the British aristocracy to his grave, which, after a few 
years, will hardly be noticed by the side of the graves of 
Fox and Chatham ; Lincoln was followed by the sorrow 
of his country across the continent to his resting place in 
the heart of the Mississippi valley, to be remembered 
through all time by his countrymen, and by all the peo- 
ple of the world. — Memorial Address. 

Note.— This address was delivered before the two houses of congress, Febru- 
ary 12, 1866. 



SELECTION XXL 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 
PART I. 

The eternal flow of existence never rests, bearing the 
human race onward through continuous change. Prin- 
ciples grow into life by informing the public mind, and 
in their maturity gain the mastery over events ; follow- 
ing each other as they are bidden, and ruling without a 
pause. No sooner do the agitated waves begin to sub- 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 75 

side, than, amidst the formless tossing of the billows, a 
new messenger from the Infinite Spirit moves over the 
waters ; and the bark which is freighted with the for- 
tunes of mankind yields to the gentle breath as it first 
whispers among the shrouds, even while the beholders 
still doubt if the breeze is springing, and whence it comes, 
and whither it will go. 

The hour of revolution was at hand, promising free- 
dom to conscience and dominion to intelligence. His- 
tory, escaping from the dictates of authority and the jars 
of insulated interests, enters upon new and unthought-of 
domains of culture and equality, the happier society 
where power s])rings freshly from ever renewed consent ; 
the life and activity of a connected world. 

For Europe, the crisis foreboded the struggles of gen- 
erations. The strong bonds of faith and affection, which 
once united the separate classes of its civil hierarchy, had 
lost their vigor. In the impending chaos of states, the 
ancient forms of society, after convulsive agonies, were 
doomed to be broken in pieces, and the fragments to be- 
come distinct, and seemingly lifeless, like the dust ; ready 
to be whirled in a deadly sand storm by the tempest of 
public rage. The voice of reform, as it passed over the 
desolation, would inspire animation afresh ; but in the 
classes whose power was crushed, as well as in the op- 
pressed who knew not that they were redeemed, it might 
also awaken wild desires, Avliich the ruins of a former 
world could not satiate. In America, the influences of 
time were molded by the creative force of reason, senti- 
ment, and nature ; its political edifice rose in lovely pro- 
portions, as if to the melodies of the lyre. Peacefully 
and without crime, humanity was to make for itself a 
new existence. 

A few men of Anglo-Saxon descent, chiefly farmers, 
planters, and mechanics, with their wives and children, 



76 SELECTIONS FR03I THE WRITINGS 

liad crossed the Atlantic, in search of freedom and for- 
tune. They brought the civilization which tlie past had 
bequeathed to Great Britain ; they were followed by the 
slave ship and the African ; their prosperity invited 
emigrants from every lineage of central and western 
Europe ; the mercantile system to which they were sub- 
jected prevailed in the councils of all metropolitan states, 
and extended its restrictions to every continent that 
allured to conquest, commerce, or colonization. The 
accomplishment of their independence would agitate the 
globe, would assert the freedom of the oceans as com- 
mercial highways, vindicate power in the commonwealth 
for the united judgment of its people, and assure to them 
the right to a self-directing vitality. 

The authors of the American Revolution avowed for 
their object the welfare of mankind, and believed that 
they were in the service of their own and of all future 
generations. Their faith was just; for the world of 
mankind does not exist in fragments, nor can a country 
have an insulated existence. All men are brothers, and 
all are bondsmen for one another. All nations, too, are 
brothers, and each one is responsible for that federative 
humanity which puts the ban of exclusion on none. New 
principles of government could not assert themselves in 
one hemisphere without affecting the other. The very 
idea of the progress of an individual people, in its relation 
to universal history, springs from the acknowledged unity 
of the race. — Vol. III.., Page 3. 



From the dawn of social l)eing, there has appeared a 
tendency toward con.imerce and intercourse between the 
scattered inhabitants of the earth. That mankind have 
ever earnestly desired this connection appears from their 
willing homage to the adventurers, and to every people 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. T7 

who have greatly enlarged the boundaries of the world, 
as known to civilization. The traditions of remotest 
antiquity celebrate the half divine wanderer who raised 
pillars on the shores of the Atlantic ; and record, as a 
visitant from the skies, the iirst traveler from Europe 
to the central rivers of Asia. It is the glory of Greece 
that, when she had gathered on her islands and among 
her hills the scattered beams of human intelligence, her 
numerous colonies carried the accumulated light to the 
neighborhood of the ocean, and to the shores of the Eux- 
ine. Her wisdom and her arms connected continents. 

When civilization intrenched herself within the beau- 
tiful promontory of Italy, and Rome led the van of 
European reform, the same movement continued, with 
still vaster results ; for, though the military republic 
bounded the expansive spirit of independence by giving 
dominion to property, and extended her own influence 
by the sword, yet, heaping up conquests, adding island 
to continent, crushing nationalities, offering a shrine to 
strange gods, and citizenship to every vanquished people, 
she extended over a larger empire the benefits of fixed 
principles of law, and a cosmopolitan polytheism pre- 
vailed as the religion of the world. 

To have asserted clearly the unity of mankind was 
the distinctive character of the Christian religion. No 
more were the nations to be severed by the worship of 
exclusive deities. The world was instructed that all 
men are of one blood ; that for all there is but one divine 
nature, and but one moral law ; and the renovating faith 
taught the singleness of the race, of which it embodied 
the aspirations, and guided the advancement. The tribes 
of northern Europe, emerging freshly from the wild 
nurseries of nations, opened new regions to culture, com- 
merce, and refinement. The beams of the majestic tem- 
ple, which antiquity had reared to its many gods, were 



78 SELECTIONS FR03I THE WRITINGS 

already falling in ; the roving invaders, taking to their 
hearts the regenerating creed, became its intrepid mes- 
sengers, and bore its symbols even to Iceland and 
Siberia. 

Still nearer were the relations of the connected world 
when an enthusiastic reformer, glowing with selfish am- 
l)ition, and angry at the hollow forms of idolatry, rose 
lip in the deserts of Arabia, and founded a system, whose 
emissaries, never diverging widely from the warmer 
zone, conducted armies from Mecca to the Ganges, where 
its principle was at variance with the limitation of castes ; 
and to the Ebro, where a life of the senses could mock at 
degenerate superstitions, yet without the power to create 
anew. How did the two systems animate all the conti- 
nents of the Old World to combat for the sepulcher of 
Christ, till Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, came into 
conflict, and intercourse with the arts, as well as the 
arms, of the South and East, from Morocco to Ilindoo- 
stan ! 

In due time appeared the mariner from Genoa. To 
Columbus God gave the keys that unlock the barriers of 
the ocean, so that he tilled Christendom with his glory. 
The voice of the world had whispered to him that the 
world is one ; and, as he went forth toward the west, 
plowing a wave which no European keel had entered, 
it was his high purpose not merely to open new paths to 
islands or to continents, but to bring together the ends of 
the earth, and join all nations in commerce and spiritual 
life. 

While the world of mankind is accomplishing its 
nearer connection, it is also advancing in the power of 
its intelligence. The possession of reason is the engage- 
ment for that progress of which history keeps the record. 
The faculties of each individual mind are limited in their 
development ; the reason of the whole strives for perfec- 



OF OEOROE BANCROFT. 79 

tion ; has been restlessly forming itself from the first 
moment of human existence, and has never met bounds 
to its capacity for improvement. The generations of 
men are not like the leaves on the trees, which fall, and 
renew themselves without melioration or change ; indi- 
viduals disappear like the foliage and the flowers ; the 
existence of our kind is continuous, and its ages are 
reciprocally dependent. Were it not so, there would be 
no great truths inspiring action, no laws regulating 
human achievements. The movement of the living 
world would be as the ebb and flow of the ocean ; and 
the mind would no more be touched by the visible 
agency of Providence in human affairs. — Vol. III., 
Page 5. 



Institutions may crumljle, and governments fall, but 
it is only that they may renew a better youth, and mount 
upward like the eagle ; the petals of the flower wither 
that fruit may form. The desire of perfection, springing 
always from moral power, rules even the sword, and 
escapes unharmed from the field of carnage ; giving to 
battles all that they can have of luster, and to warriors 
their only glory ; surviving martyrdoms, and safe amid 
the wreck of states. On the banks of the stream of 
time, not a monument has been raised to a hero or a 
nation but tells the tale, and renews the hope of im- 
provement. Each people that has disappeared, every 
institution that has passed away, has been but a step in 
the ladder by which humanity ascends toward the per- 
fecting of its nature. 

And how has it always been advancing, to the just 
judgments of the past adding the discoveries of succes- 
sive ages ! The generations that the torch of truth along 
the lines of time themselves become dust and ashes ; but 



so SELECTIONS FR03I THE WRITINGS 

the liglit still increases its ever-burning flame, and is fed 
more and more plenteouslj with consecrated oil. How 
is progress manifest in religion, from the gross symbols 
of the East to the sublime philosophy of Greece, from 
the fetichism of the savage to the polytheism of Rome ; 
from the multiplied forms of ancient superstition, and 
the lovely representations of deities in stone, to the clear 
conception of the unity of divine power, and the idea of 
the presence of God in the soul ! How has mind, in its 
inquisitive freedom, taught man to employ the elements 
as mechanics do their tools, and already, in part at least, 
made him the master and possessor of nature ! How has 
knowledge not only been increased, but diffused ! How 
has morality been constantly tending to subdue the 
supremacy of brute force, to refine passion, to enrich lit- 
erature with the varied forms of pure thought and deli- 
cate feeling! How has social life been improved, and 
every variety of toil in the rield and in the workshop 
been ennobled by the willing industry of free men ! 
How has humanity been growing conscious of its unity 
and watchful of its own development, till pu1)lic opinion, 
bursting the bonds of nationality, knows itself to be the 
spirit of the world in its movement on the tide of thought 
from generation to generation ! 

From the intelligence that had been slowly ripening 
in the mind of cultivated humanity sprung the American 
Revolution, which was designed to organize social union 
through the establishment of personal freedom, and thus 
emancipate the nations from all authorit}'' not flowing 
from themselves. 

In the old civilization of Europe, ]iower moved from 
a superior to inferiors and subjects ; a priesthood trans- 
mitted a common faith, from which it would tolerate no 
dissent ; the government esteemed itself, by compact or 
by divine right, invested with sovereignty, dispensing 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 81 

protection and demanding allegiance. But a new prin- 
ciple, far mightier than the church and state of the middle 
ages, was forcing itself into activity. Successions of 
increasing culture and heroes in the world of thought had 
conquered for mankind the idea of the freedom of the 
individual ; the creative, but long-latent, energy that 
resides in the collective reason, was next to be revealed. 
From this the state was to emerge like the fabled spirit 
of beauty and love out of the foam of the ever troubled 
ocean. It was the office of America to substitute for 
hereditary privilege the natural equality of man ; for 
the irresponsible authority of a sovereign, a dependent 
government emanating from the concord of opinion ; and 
as she moved forward in her high career, the multitudes 
of every clime gazed toward her example with hopes of 
untold happiness, and all the nations of the earth sighed 
to be renewed. 

The American Revolution, of which I write the his- 
tory, essaying to unfold the principles which organized 
its events, and bound to keep faith with the ashes of its 
heroes, was most radical in its character, yet achieved 
with such benign tranquillity that even conservatism hes- 
itated to censure. A civil war armed men of the same 
ancestry against each other, yet for the advancement of 
the principles of everlasting peace and universal brother- 
hood. A new plebeian democracy took its place by the 
side of the proudest empires. Religion was disenthralled 
from civil institutions ; thought obtained for itself free 
utterance by speech and by press ; industry was commis- 
sioned to follow the bent of its own genius; the system 
of commercial restrictions between states was reprobated 
and shattered ; and the oceans were enfranchised for 
every peaceful keel. International law was humanized 
and softened ; and a new, milder, and more just mari- 
time code was concerted and enforced. The trade in 
6 



82 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

slaves was branded and restrained. The language of 
Bacon and Milton, of Chatham and Washington, became 
so diffused, that in every zone, and almost in every longi- 
tude, childhood lisps the English as its mother tongue. 
The equality of all men was declared ; personal freedom 
secured in its complete individuality ; and common con- 
sent recognized as the only just origin of fundamental 
laws ; so that in thirteen separate states, with ample terri- 
tory for creating more, the inhabitants of each formed 
their own political institutions. By the side of the prin- 
ciple of the freedom of the individual and the freedom 
of the separate states, the noblest work of human intel- 
lect was consummated in a federative union ; and that 
union put away every motive to its destruction, by insur- 
ing to each successive generation the right to better its 
constitution, according to the increasing intelligence of 
the living people. 

Astonishing deeds, throughout the world, attended 
these changes. Armies fought in the wilderness for rule 
over the solitudes which were to be the future dwelling 
place of millions ; navies hunted each other through 
every sea, engaging in battle now near the region of ice- 
bergs, now within the tropics. Inventive art was sum- 
moned to make war more destructive, and to signalize 
sieges by new miracles of ability and daring. Africa 
was, in part, appropriated by rival nations of white men, 
and in Asia an adventurous company of British traders 
planted themselves as masters in the empire of the Great 
Mogul. 

For America, the period abounded in new forms of 
virtue and greatness. Fidelity to principle pervaded the 
masses. An unorganized people, of their own free will, 
suspended commerce by universal assent. Poverty re- 
jected bribes. Heroism, greater than that of chivalry, 
burst into action from lowly men. Citizens, with their 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 83 

families, fled from their homes and wealth in towns, 
rather than yield to oppression. Battalions sprung np in 
a night from spontaneous patriotism. Where eminent 
statesmen hesitated, the instinctive action of the multi- 
tude revealed the counsels of magnanimity. Youth and 
genius gave up life freely for the liberties of mankind. 
A nation without union, without magazines and arsenals, 
without a treasury, without credit, without government, 
fought successfully against the whole strength and wealth 
of Great Britain. An army of veteran soldiers capitu- 
lated to insurgent husbandmen. — Vol. III., Page 8. 



SELECTION XXII. 

INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION. 

After the sighs and sorrows of centuries, in the dawn 
of serener days, an Augustine monk, having also a heart 
of flame, seized on the same great ideas ; and he and his 
followers, with wives and children, restored them to the 
world. At his bidding, truth leaped over the cloister 
walls, and challenged every man to make her his guest ; 
aroused every intelligence to acts of private judgment ; 
changed a dependent, recipient people into a reflecting, 
inquiring people; lifted each human being out of the 
castes of the middle age, to endow him with individu- 
ality,, and summoned man to stand forth as man. The 
world heaved with the fervent conflict of opinion. The 
people and their guides recognized the dignity of labor. 
The oppressed peasantry took up arms for liberty. Men 
reverenced and exercised the freedom of the soul. The 
breath of the new spirit moved over the earth. It 
revived Poland, animated Germany, swayed the North ; 
and the inquisition of Spain could not silence its whispers 
among the mountains of the peninsula. It invaded 



84 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

France; and, though bonfires of heretics, by way of 
warning, were lighted at the gates of Paris, it infused 
itself into the French mind, and led to unwonted free 
discussions. Exile could not quench it. On the banks 
of the Lake of Geneva, Calvin stood forth the boldest 
reformer of his day ; not personally engaging in political 
intrigues, yet, by promulgating great ideas, forming the 
seed-plot of revolution ; bowing only to the Invisible ; 
acknowledging no sacrament of ordination but the choice 
of the laity, no patent of nobility but that of the elect of 
God, with its seals of eternity. 

Luther's was still a Catholic religion. It sought to 
instruct all, to confirm all, to sanctify all ; and so, under 
the shelter of princes, it gave established forms to Protes- 
tant Germany and Sweden and Denmark and England. 
But Calvin taught an exclusive doctrine, which, tliough 
it addressed itself to all, rested only on the chosen. 
Lutheranism was, therefore, not a political party ; it 
included prince and noble and peasant. Calvinism was 
revolutionary. "Wherever it came, it created division. 
Its symbol, as set up on the " Institutes " of its teacher, 
was a riaming sword. By the side of the eternal mount- 
ains, and perennial snows, and arrowy rivers of Switz- 
erland, it established a religion without a prelate, a 
government without a king. Fortified by its faith in 
fixed decrees, it kept possession of its homes among the 
Alps. It grew powerful in France, and invigorated, 
between the feudal nobility and the crown, the long con- 
test, which did not end till the subjection of the nobility, 
through the central despotism, prepared the ruin of tliat 
despotism by promoting the equality of the commons. 
It entered Holland, inspiring an industrious nation with 
heroic enthusiasm ; enfranchising and uniting provinces, 
and making burghers and weavers and artisans victors 
of the highest orders of Spanish chivalry, the power of 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 85 

the inquisition, and the pretended majesty of kings. It 
penetrated Scotland, and, while its whirlwind bore along 
persuasion among glens and mountains, it shrank from 
no danger, and hesitated at no ambition ; it nerved its 
rugged but hearty envoy to resist the flatteries of the 
beautiful Queen Mary ; it assumed the education of her 
only son ; it divided the nobility ; it penetrated the 
masses, overturned the ancient ecclesiastical establish- 
ment, planted the free parochial school, and gave a living 
energy to the principle of liberty in a people. It infused 
itself into England, and placed its plebeian sympathies 
in daring resistance to the courtly hierarchy ; dissenting 
from dissent, longing to introduce the reign of righteous- 
ness, it invited every man to read the Bible, and made 
itself dear to the connnon mind by teaching, as a divine 
revelation, the unity of the race, and the natural equality 
of man. It claimed for itself freedom of utterance, and 
through the pulpit, in eloquence imbued with the author- 
itative words of pro.phets and apostles, spoke to the 
whole congregation. It sought new truth, denying the 
sanctity of the continuity of tradition. It stood up 
against the middle age, and its forms in church and 
state, hating them with a fierce and unquenchable 
hatred. 

Imprisoned, maimed, oppressed at home, its indeiDend- 
ent converts in Great Britain looked beyond the Atlantic 
for a better world. Their energetic passion was nur- 
tured by trust in the divine protection, their power of 
will was safely intrenched in their own vigorous creed ; 
and under the banner of the gosjDel, with the fervid and 
enduring love of the myriads who in Europe adojDted the 
stern simplicity of the disciples of Calvin, they sailed for 
the wilderness, far away from "popery and prelacy," 
from the traditions of the church, from hereditary power, 
from the sovereignty of an earthly king, — from all 



86 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 

dominion but the Bible, and "what rose from natural 
reason and the principles of equity y—IIistor(/, Vol. III., 
Page 99. 

SELECTION XXIII. 

THE ACADIANS. 

The tenth of September was the day for the embark- 
ation of a part of the exiles. They were drawn up six 
deep ; and the young men, one hundred and sixty-one in 
number, were ordered to march first on board the vessel. 
They could leave their farms and cottages, the shady 
rocks on w^hich they had reclined, their herds and their 
garners ; but nature yearned within them and they would 
mot be separated from their parents. Yet of what avail 
was the frenzied desjjair of the unarmed youth ; they 
had not one weapon ; the bayonet drove them to obey ; 
and they marched slowly and heavily from the chapel to 
the shore, between women and children, who kneeling 
prayed for l)lessings on their heads, they themselves 
weeping and praying and singing hymns. The seniors 
went next ; the wives and children must wait till other 
transport vessels arrive. The delay had its horrors. The 
wretched people left behind were kept together near the 
sea, without proper food or raiment or shelter, till other 
ships came to take them away ; and December, with its 
appalling cold, had struck the shivering, half -clad, broken- 
hearted sufferers, before the last of them were removed. 
" The embarkation of the inhabitants goes on but slowly," 
wrote Monckton, from Fort Cumberland, near which he 
had burned three hamlets ; " the most part of the wives 
of the men we have prisoners are gone off with their 
children, in hopes I would not send off their husbands 
withont them." Their hope was vain. Near Annapolis, 
a Inindred heads of families fled to the woods, and a 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 87 

party was detached on the hunt to l)riiig' them in. " Our 
soldiers hate them," wrote an otticer on this occasion, " and 
if they can but find a pretext to kill them, they will." 
Did a prisoner seek to escape, he was shot down by the 
sentinel. Yet some fled to Quebec ; more than three 
thousand had withdrawn to Miramachi and the region 
south of the Ristigouche ; some found rest on the banks 
of the St. John's and its branches ; some found a lair in 
their native forests ; some were charitably sheltered from 
the English in the wigwams of the savages. But seven 
thousand of these banished people were driven on board 
ships, and scattered among the English colonies, from 
New Hampshire to Georgia ; one thousand and twenty to 
South Carolina alone. They were cast ashore without 
resources ; hating the poorhouse as a shelter for their 
offspring, and abhorring the thought of selling themselves 
as laborers. Households, too, were separated, the colo- 
nial newspapers containing advertisements of members 
of families seeking their companions, of sons anxious to 
reach and relieve their parents, of mothers moaning for 
their children. 

The wanderers sighed for their native country ; but to 
prevent their return, their villages, from Annapolis to the 
isthmus, were laid waste. Their old homes were but 
ruins. In the disti'ict of Minas, for instance, two hun- 
dred and fifty of their houses, and more than as many 
barns, were consumed. The live stock which belonged 
to them, consisting of great numbers of horned cattle, 
hogs, sheep, and horses, were seized as spoils and dis- 
posed of by the English officials. A beautiful and fertile 
tract of country was reduced to a solitude. There was 
none left round the ashes of the cottages of the Aca- 
dians but the faithful watch-dog, vainly seeking the 
hands that fed him. Thickets of forest trees choked 



o8 SELECTIONS FRO 31 THE WRITINGS 

their orchards ; the ocean broke over their neglected 
dikes, and desolated their meadows. 

Relentless misfortune pursued the exiles wherever 
they fled. Those sent to Georgia, drawn by a love for 
the spot where they were born as strong as that of the 
captive Jews who wept by the rivers of Babylon, for 
their own temple and land, escaped to sea in boats, and 
w^ent coasting from harbor to harbor; but, when they 
had reached New England, just as they would have set 
sail for their native fields, they were stopped by orders 
from Nova Scotia. Those who dwelt on the St. John's 
were torn from their new homes. When Canada surren- 
dered, hatred with its worst venom pursued the fifteen 
hundred who remained south of the Ristigouche. Once 
those who dwelt in Pennsylvania presented a humble 
petition to the Earl of Loudoun, then the British com- 
mander in chief in America ; and the cold-hearted peer, 
offended that the prayer was made in French, seized 
their five principal men, who in their own land had been 
persons of dignity and substance, and shipped them to 
England, with the request that they might be kept from 
ever becoming troublesome by being consigned to service 
as common sailors on board ships of war. No doubt ex- 
isted of the king's approbation. The lords of trade, 
more merciless than the savages and than the wilderness 
in winter, wished very much that every one of the Aca- 
dians should be driven out ; and, when it seemed that 
the work was done, congratulated the king that " the 
zealous endeavors of Lawrence had been crowned with 
an entire success." "We did," said Edmund Burke, 
" in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretenses 
that in the eye of an honest man are not worth a far- 
thing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, 
whom our utter inability to govern, or to reconcile, gave 
us no sort of right to extirpate." I know not if the annals 



OF GEORGE BANCROFT. 89 

of the luiman race keep the record of sorrows so wan- 
tonly inflicted, so bitter, and so perennial, as fell npon 
the French inhabitants of Acadia. ''We have been 
true," they said of themselves, " to our religion and true 
to ourselves ; yet nature appears to consider us only as the 
objects of public vengeance." The hand of the English 
official seemed under a spell with regard to them, and 
was never uplifted but to curse them. — History, Vol. 
III., Page 133. 



SELECTION XXiy. 

WESLEY AND THE REVOLUTION. 

The pure-minded man, who in a sensual age became 
the quickeuer of religious fervor, the preacher to the 
poor, John Wesley, also came forward to defend the sys- 
tem of the court with the usual arguments. lie looked 
so steadily toward the world beyond the skies, that he 
could not brook the interruption of devout gratitude by 
bloody contests in this stage of being. Besides, he saw 
that the rupture between the English and the Americans 
w^as growing wader every day, and to him the total de- 
fection of America was the evident prelude of a conspir- 
acy against monarchy, of which the bare thought made 
him shudder. " No governments under heaven," said 
he, '' are so despotic as the republican ; no subjects are 
governed in so arl)itrary a manner as those of a common- 
wealth. The people never but once in all history gave 
the sovereign power, and that was to Masaniello of 
Naples. Our sins will never be removed, till we fear 
God and honor the king." Wesley's mental constitution 
was not robust enough to gaze on the future with un- 
blenched calm. He could not foresee that the constella- 
tion of republics, so soon to rise in the wilds of America, 



90 SELECTIONS FROM GEORGE BANCROFT. 

would welcome the members of the society which he 
was to fomid as the pioneers of rehgion ; that the breath 
of Kberty would waft their messages to the masses of the 
people ; would encourage them to collect the white and 
the negro, slave and master, in the greenwood, for coun- 
sel on divine love and full assurance of grace ; and 
would carry their consolation and songs and prayers to 
the furthest cabins in the wilderness. To the gladdest 
of glad tidings for the political regeneration of the world, 
Wesley listened with timid trembling, as to the fearful 
bursting of the flood-gates of revolution, and he knew 
not that God was doing a work which should lead the na- 
tions of the earth to joy. — Vol. I V., Page 1^.9 J^.. 



SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 



BIOGRAPHY. 

1. Wliat other great historians have been educated at 
Harvard i 

2. Wliat distinguished poets ? 

3. Wliat special advantages for study did Bancroft 
enjoy after graduating at Harvard ? 

4. What experience did he have as a teacher ? 

5. What government positions has he held ? 

6. What literary man did he befriend ? 

7. What memorial addresses has he delivered ? 

8. Does he believe firmly in the Christian religion ? 

9. What evidence is there of this i 

10. From what event does he think the revolution 
sprang ? 

SELECTION I. 

1. Why does he use the expression Milton and 
Hampden f 

2. When was Milton born ? 

3. Was it possible for him to see Shakespeare ? 

4. At what college did he graduate ? 

5. How many years did he spend in study as a prep- 
aration for his work ? 

6. How many years of his life were spent in political 
strife ? 

7. What relation did he sustain to Cromwell ? 

8. What political pamphlets did he write % 

9. How often was he married ? 

10. How did he treat his daughters? 

91 



92 SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 

11. When did lie write " Paradise Lost ? " 

12. What j)art did Hampden have in the English 
revolution ? 

13. Was he a champion of liberty as well as a vigor- 
ous writer and speaker 'I 

14. What do jou think of Bancroft's tribute to the 
English language 'i 

15. In what does its beauty consist ? 

SELECTION 11. 

1. Give an estimate of this .selection ? 

2. Is it a fine description ^ 

3. Point out the participles. 

4. What word has its plural in a ? 

5. It is derived from what language ? 

6. Why do the adjectives majestic and free follow 
forests ? 

7. Is there any objection to the word relation as used 
in last sentence 't 

SELECTION III. 

1. Give the pronunciation of Geneose and Genoa. 

2. Who is meant by the "Augustine monk " ? 

3. Who was the '' French refugee " ? 

4. Give the pronunciation of Augustine, inquiries, 
enfranchisement. 

5. Give the meaning of the words indulgences, 
schism, proselyte. 

0. Are the sentences strong and elegant ? 

SELECTION IV. 

1. When did the Reformation commence ? 

2. What caused it? 

3. What rendered its growth rapid ? 

4. What was the burden of Luther's preaching ? 



SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 93 

SELECTION y. 

1. Give the main facts in the Hfe of Luther. 

2. Give the main facts in the hfe of Calvin. 

3. Which was the more radical reformer ? 

4. Did Luther always believe in transubstantiation ? 

5. In a literary point of view, what is the most 
noticeable thing about this selection 'i 

6. Compare it witli Johnson's parallel between Pope 
and Dryden ; also with Pope's parallel between Homer 
and Virgil. 

7. What is meant by " parity of the clergy " ? 

SELECTION VL 

1. Why is the first sentence of this selection strong ? 

2. How m-any subordinate clauses in it ? 

3. Would the sentence be as strong if the principal 
clause came first ? 

4. Is the sense suspended until near the close ? 

5. Give the main facts in the lives of the men men- 
tioned in the selection. 

6. Give the meaning of plenitude., harbinger., pre- 
cursor. 

7. Give the pronunciation of lenity and lenient. 

8. Is the last sentence strong ? Why 'i 

9. Is it loose or periodic ? 

Note. — In a loose sentence there may be a grammatic close at one or more 
places before the end. In a periodic sentence the sense is suspended till near 
the end. 

SELECTION VII. 

1. Give main facts in life of Penn. 

2. Give main facts in life of Locke. 

3. How did they differ in their views of the soul ? 

4. How did they differ in their views of government? 

5. Is the parallel W'ell sustained ? 



94 SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 

SELECTION VIII. 

1. How does Bancroft's estimate of Penn differ from 
Macaulay's estimate of him ? 

2. Which is more nearly right ? 

SELECTION IX. 

1. What does Bancroft say of the religious character 
of the early colonists? 

2. Notice his noble and discriminating tribute to the 
Christian religion. 

3. Who was the " Newgate prisoner " ? 

4. Point out all the participles in the selection. 

SELECTION X. 

1. Point out all the figures of speech in this selection. 

2. Where and when did the Puritans have their 
origin ? 

3. Deiine tiffany^ superficial., scion, criterion., arro- 
gance, infallible, subservient, laity. 

4. Is the parallel between Puritanism and chivalry 
well sustained ? 

5. Give an estimate of the literary value of this selec- 



tion. 



SELECTION XL 



1. When was Cromwell born ? 

2. Where was he educated ? 

3. Did he ever meet Charles I. in his boyhood ? 

4. How did he gain his first military renown ? 

5. Was he a blessing to the English people ? 

6. What did he accomplish for the nation ? 

7. When did he die ? 

8. What became of his body ? 



SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 95 

SELECTION XII. 

1. When did Hudson make his explorations? 

2. He was a native of what country ? 

3. What nation claimed the lands he discovered ? 

4. Define sedgy, toanton, progeny, yeoman. 

5. Is this a good description ? 

SELECTION XIII. 

1. Give the main facts in the life of Franklin. 

2. State some interesting facts in his boyhood. 

3. What part did he have in framing the Declaration 
of Independence ? 

4. Where was he during the most of the revolution- 
ary war ? 

5. What part did he take in the convention that drew 
up the Constitution of the United States ? 

6. What are some of his discoveries in science ? 

7. Does Bancroft do justice to him? 

SELECTION XIV. 

1. How many men were killed in the battle of Lex- 
ington ? 

2. Why do we still regard it as an event of great 
importance ? 

3. Was Ealph Waldo Emerson related to William 
Emerson ? 

4. Is Longfellow's " Paul Revere " essentially correct 
in a historical point of view ? 

5. Is there any objection to the expression, the grass 
gronrmg ranJdy f 

5. Point out the longest sentence in the selection. 
7. Is it clear ? 



96 SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 

SELECTION XV. 

1. Give tlie main facts in the early life of Washing- 
ton. 

2. Compare his boyliood with the hojhood of some 
of our other great men. 

3. Were the circnmstances surronnding his boyhood 
calculated to develop him into a great man 'i 

4. What do you think of the description given of 
Washington's appearance ? 

5. Give reasons for the various marks of punctuation 
in the selection, 

6. His dark hhie eyes, etc. Why is one relative 
clause in this sentence separated by commas, and the 
other not '^ 

7. Braddock selected Mm as an aid. State the case 
of aid, and give reason. 

8. Point out the compound words. 

9. Is there any objection to the sentence beginning 
" Profoundly impressed with confidence in God's provi- 
dence " ? What does the participle belong to ? 

10. Mention six characteristics of Washington as 
revealed in this selection. 

11. Give pronunciation of disastrous, vehement, and 
exemplary. 

12. Give meaning of prodigal, parsimonious, emolu- 
ifnent, attenuated. 

13. What is the case of head in the last sentence of 
the selection ? 

14. Give your estimate of the literary value of the 
selection. 

SELECTION XVI. 

1. When and where was Adams born ? 

2. Where was he educated ? 



SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 97 

3. Name some of his descendants. 

4. How was he connected with the " Boston Massa- 
cre " ? 

5. State his connection witli " Declaration of Inde- 
pendence." 

6. Where was he during the revohitionary war 'I 

7. What offices of trust did he hohl ? 

8. How many electoral votes did lie have when Jef- 
ferson was first chosen ? 

9. What political party did Adams belong to ? 

10. When did he die?' 

11. Who delivered the great oration on his life and 
character ? 

12. Who was president at that time ? 

13. What do you think of this selection as a charac- 
ter study? 

14. What faults in Adams are pointed out ? 

15. What virtues are praised ? 

16. Has Bancroft aimed to be fair ? 

17. What does he say was Adams' greatest fault ? 

18. Have you any objection to the expression, " It 
laid open how deeply his self-love was wounded " ? 

19. Wliat is said of Adams' religious character ? 

20. Did he ever think of entering tlie ministry ? 

SELECTION XYII. 

1. Notice the use of participles in the third sentence. 

2. Would the sentence be as elegant if the participial 
phrases were expanded into clauses ? 

SELECTION XVIII. 

1. Point out the strong points of this selection. 

2. Define oracles^ litanies.^ atrophied. 

7 



98 SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 

SELECTION XIX. 

1. Give main facts in the early life of Jefferson. 

2. What great speech probably first animated him ? 

3. How old was he when he wrote the " Declaration 
of Independence " ? 

4. Who else were on the committee to draft it? 

5. Where was he during the revolutionary war? 

6. What were his relations with Aaron Burr ? 

7. When did he die ? 

SELECTION XX. 

1. Give the important facts in Lincoln's life. 

2. What do you think of the parallel between Lincoln 
and Palmerston ? 

3. Does this address reveal Bancroft's faith in the 
Deity? 

SELECTION XXI. 

1. Do you consider this selection philosophical ? 

2. Point out the beauties of rhetoric found in it. 

3. Classify the rhetorical figures in it. 

SELECTION XXII. 

1. What nations did the Reformation influence most ? 

2. Point out the participles that have the force of an 
adjective and verb. 

3. Point out the similes and metaphors. 

SELECTION XXIIL 

1. Give an account of the Acadians. 

2. Where can some of them be found now ? 

3. Has Longfellow exaggerated the sufferings of the 
Acadians in his " Evangeline " ? 



iSUOGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 99 

SELECTION XXIV. 

1. How many times did Wesley visit America ? 

2. What was his influence as one of the pioneer 
preachers of the land ? 

3. Wliat has been his influence on the religious 
thought of the country i 



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